Darcy Dursley and the Oversight
by Enigmatic Insignia
Summary: Darcy Dursley spent fifteen years surrounded by magic. It transformed his father from a spoiled brat into to a halfway decent adult. It made his grandmother resentful and unusually uncomfortable. Aside from the occasional stress of being a muggle aware it existed, magic basically ignored Darcy—until the day of September 1, 2021. Then, it changed his life completely.
1. Witching Hour

As time was wont to do to most things, the peachy bricks and general dullness of number four Privet Drive had changed. Seven years ago, the street had been repaved, giving the pavement a brighter black sheen than the surrounding driveways. Two years after that, discussions had begun to expand the public transit system. This, like most public transit, failed to move quickly. Last year, most of this particular home's formerly immaculate garden had been destroyed by an infestation from an odd type of beetle. The shrubbery had since been replaced by large brown rocks and splotches of blue hosta.

Still, sometimes, the manner in which change occurred was more of a reversion. It was that type of a change which brought Dudley Dursley to move his then-wife, Colleen, and their two children, Darcy and Atticus, to live in what had once been his childhood home. The room which had once been Dudley's now belonged to his mother, Petunia. His parents' old room now belonged to him. The spare guest room was the same as always, and would occasionally house whatever relatives chose to visit. Atticus and Darcy shared the second, smaller bedroom that had once held most of Dudley's unwanted things. There had also been a point when it housed some famous wizard, but that was a matter none had meant to mention.

However, like many things which were supposedly meant to be, time would change that, too.

An ordinary night had fallen upon the humdrum Dursleys, who had been sound asleep by the standard time of ten. With the faint, innocuous humming of the air conditioner, it seemed that even the house itself was snoring. Only the hazy glow of a smart-phone camera dared creep across the hall. The stream of light lead back to a mop of brown hair attached to superhero jim-jams and the child currently inside them.

Darcy liked to think he knew better than to be scared of such things as darkness. Still, the stillness was as strange as his new home had ever been. Every story he'd ever read seemed to say there were few things monsters liked more than a perfectly normal place, and this house seemed plain as any.

Slowly, Darcy took a step out into the hallway. His toes settled against the floorboard, tiptoeing across the way. A "ggrk-rlmr-" gurgled beneath.

With a gasp to jolt him along, Darcy's shoulders scrunched up to attention. The light of his mobile phone followed suit, leaping to the ceiling. His breath lodged in his throat.

The hallway stared back as best a hallway could, utterly unfocused with no emotions or threats, merely a state of being. Darcy stared further all the same, waiting for something that, unless given centuries to do so, likely wouldn't bother changing on its own.

Slowly, Darcy's shoulders slouched back to their normal stance. He wrapped his second hand around the front of his phone, flipping the light back on. The beam cast across the hallway once more, showing the immobile walls and flimsy end table ahead.

"Nothing. It's nothing. Or Mike Wazowski," Darcy muttered, calming himself with the ridiculousness of one-eyed comedians hiding in closets when they could be on YouTube instead.

With trepidation in each step, Darcy crossed the grounds of his new home's tiny hall back to his bedroom. He pressed his shoulder against the door, starting to open it."Murghr-mm—" a gurgled moan called through the wood, louder than before.

For a second, Darcy pulled back, flinching. It took that second of squinted staring for him to recognize the sound. That gurgle had never been a floorboard. It was human.

A light shone beneath the covers of Atticus' bed, pointing upwards at about the point his head would have been. The orange cracks snuck out, barely illuminating the glow in the dark planets and star stickers that lined their bedroom walls. Halfway unpacked cardboard boxes scattered across the stained rocket-ship carpet. Legos and action figures strayed about, forming the usual plastic minefield of a well-played-in room. The toys' shadows stretched beneath Darcy's mobile as rushed towards the bed.

"Atticus-!" Darcy called, hushed, but nonetheless admonishing. "Stop it. You'll wake mum."

"Thrm—molm—eyes—" the mumbling grew louder still, to the point where it may have been a typical conversational tone if not for the giant comforter overhead.

"Att-"

Darcy grit his teeth, his foot having smacked against a lego. He limped through his last step over to Atticus' bed. He tossed aside the comforter and sharpened his eyes upon his brother. "Atticus—"

The light beneath the sheet cast across the entire room. The plastic stars turned sickly pale against the medium blue walls. Every box, toy and tattered book were as vivid as day. Again, Darcy flinched, not from pain, but surprise.

Atticus' voice called back to him, no longer garbled, yet distinctly abnormal. There was an echo in each word, as if they were speaking through tin cans and a megaphone all at once. "Break of chaos born from peace, they emerge from fold. Son of a skeptic, son of a savior, tied by love in blood."

"What?" Darcy squinted through the light, struggling to see what his eyes would let him. Had Darcy reason to believe his eyes, he'd have sworn the beams of light were spurting from every hole on Atticus' head.

Darcy grabbed onto his little brother's arms, trying to pull him to attention. Atticus' head flopped limply, no more sturdy than a doll's, but that didn't stop his distant words.

"Both of just mind, neither near age," Atticus' voice echoed against nothing.

An increasing panic froze Darcy's thoughts to a single need. "I'm calling mum!"

Again, the threat failed to stop the words-at least half of which Darcy had never heard his six-year-old brother use in his life. "One born to others' glory which his heart seeks to claim. One risen from improbable places his mind seeks to know."

Atticus' shoulders shook in Darcy's hands. He turned towards the door. "Mum! Dad!"

Darcy wished he could hear footsteps rushing towards him, yet, for now, all he heard was his brother's recitation. "Both sensing treachery among others' light. Only united can they overcome the era time demands. But only through one's death may the other's peace stand."

Darcy felt his brother's wrist for a pulse, which, thankfully, was there. He pushed down upon Atticus' shoulder, pushing him to lie sideways along the mattress.

"The future of history is at their behest. Renaissance of heart. Revolution of mind."

Darcy's unsteady fingers clutched at his phone, tapping by the lock screen. He typed straight nines in, switched to speaker and waited for an answer.

"Nine-nine-nine, what's your emergency?" a calm voice answered.

Darcy hunched closer to the phone, enough so that his words very well might have been muffled, too. "My brother. He's. Not answering. Babbling—a seizure? I think it's a seizure!"

All the while, Atticus kept on. "Or fall of all we call mankind. For the one thing that cannot stand is nothing."

The dispatcher tried to speak "Do you know your address? Are your—"

"Four Privet Drive, Surrey," Darcy interrupted.

The dispatcher paused, possibly to enter the address in their system. The silence, which may have been hardly a second, stretched on for a mortified eternity—not because Darcy could imagine his little brother dying beside him, but because that second was the one where Dudley slammed against the door.

"Dad, I—" Darcy meant to explain, yet, again, his breath found its way up to the highest shelf of his throat. He knew so little of whatever this was, he could have hardly explained it better than a dream.

As soon as the door gave way to the scene, a look came over Dudley. Again, Darcy wasn't sure he could have described it, but he inherently understood what it meant he should do.

Darcy pushed his mobile towards the top corner of the bed and scooted to the side, barely leaving a foot on his brother's mattress. He hovered by the edge to watch as Dudley approached. His father's shadow momentarily engulfed him.

Possibly having not noticed the speaker, Dudley picked up the mobile phone. "Kid thinks he's funny. My son. Ignore him." He spoke sternly into the receiver, and then ended the call.

On any other night, at any other time, Darcy would have had a thousand questions to ask. A few great ones still came to mind—why would his dad lie? Did he know what was happening?—and yet that one look meant none of it would matter. Instead, Darcy filled the silence with the one part he knew he could believe. He clutched his brother's hand.

Atticus' words repeated around them both, identical even in their inflection. "At the break of chaos born from peace, they emerge from the fold. Son of a skeptic, son of a savior—" They sank with the same weight as an unwilling silence, all-encompassing and hauntingly wrong.

Had he been a bit older, perhaps Darcy could have seen the conflict cracking through his father's expression. He imagined it when he remembered the day, yet he was never really sure it had happened. All he could state with certainty was that Dudley had crouched beside the bed, hoisted up Atticus' limp body with the amount of effort someone smaller might need to fling about a moderately sized bag of flour, and marched out the door with five stern parting words. "I'm calling your uncle. Sleep."

There'd been no need to specify which uncle, of course. There were plenty of adults who had told the boys to call them uncle, but there was only one that their father encouraged them to.

With his typical lack of obedience, Darcy stood still, holding his ground in the center of the bedroom. He counted through his father's footsteps until he had finished the stairs, and then laid down beside the door, pressing his ear straight to the crack between the wood and frame in hope of catching a spare word. Hardly half an hour later, he heard the door open. Within two, he'd fallen asleep on their rocket ship carpet, worried and confused as he'd ever been—and as he would be for the next six years.


	2. Crossing Paths

In the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, fifteen year old Darcy Dursley should logically have been in school. Instead, he stood illogically in a crowded train station, waiting by someone he wasn't convinced he wanted to be near.

"Hmph. I can't believe your father," his mother huffed, her chest visibly puffing out as might a small bird's.

"I imagine otherwise," Darcy said dully back.

His mother paused, inhaling with such exasperation and wistfulness that it seemed possible she was draining Darcy's emotions to double her own. Her hand rocked across her cheek. "Oh, I wish you weren't right."

Were King's Cross Station not currently filled with the wizarding oddities of London, Darcy could infer they'd blend into the crowd. Instead, the general impression that they perhaps belonged where they were now waiting in itself set them apart.

As per the usual, Darcy's mother had a book perched in her purse. Her eyes, which seemed a good two sizes too large for the rest of her, scanned the bustling crowd. Her neck stretched further over her collar as she surveyed the floor, emphasizing both her towering stature and meticulously proper posture. As for Darcy himself, he was as physically intimidating as a slightly overgrown porcelain hobbit. Between his sleeked-back espresso brown hair, fingerless gloves, black nail polish and rounded, boyish features, he projected the image of a sheltered angst ball who despised the world for few justifiable causes outside of unfortunate hormones.

"Oh, god, he's going to be late. What is he doing to that boy? Ironing his shoes?" his mother complained, her tone somehow managing a hint of chiming chipperness even when annoyed.

Struggling against his own exasperation, Darcy turned his back to his mother and told her what he should have some time ago. "I'm going to pee."

"Be quick, ok? You don't want to miss your brother!" Colleen ordered at his back. Though Darcy was sure she'd call it advice, Darcy had the advantage of perspective that came with not being the person doing the speaking. That was an order.

Darcy being himself, he couldn't resist doing two things in quick succession. The first was to not acknowledge his mother with so much as twitching in her direction. The second was to answer like what he had to say was completely normal. "No. I do. It's best not to pee on him."

He imagined Colleen held her hands cupped around her lips to scold him. "Darcy! Watch your words. You're—"

"A potty mouth?"

"Darcy! You-! Urgh." His mother sputtered briefly, holding words about his sass back in favor of what were hardly words at all. She turned away, searching for Atticus once more.

It was nothing new for Darcy to be ignored in favor of his brother. Ever since he'd started Hogwarts, Atticus was barely around. In the rare instance he was, his parents fought over his attention to the neglect of everything else, especially Darcy. In the past, that used to be an annoyance. While still bothersome, Darcy had learned to play it to his advantage.

In this particular instance, the advantage allowed him to sneak off into a stall of the men's restroom, pull out his mobile phone and check his messages. Six missed calls flashed across the lock screen, all of them from the same set of digits. No name was attached, just an area code and too many voice mails to bother hearing.

Darcy raised the phone, redialed and squatted over the toilet, mimicking vulnerability in case someone came in to check on him.

It was a well-kept secret among his class mates that if there was something of sufficient challenge and moral questionability one needed taken care of, Darcy was a good call. It had started in fourth year, when one of Darcy's acquaintances bet him he couldn't get their obnoxious former valedictorian-to-be suspended. One fabricated Adderall-dealing drug ring later, Darcy was essentially the fixer of St. Gerard's Secondary School.

The person behind the number answered on the third ring. "The hell're you, Dursley?"

"Train."

"Get back here! 'Fore I send someone to shove you in front of it!"

Darcy clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. "No way to talk to friends, Alan.."

"I don't pay my fregging friends, shitwad,"Alan snapped again.

"Double rate for berating me," he dismissed.

It was a shame he wasn't there to witness it, Darcy supposed. Even without being there in person, he could practically visualize smoke rising from his classmate's ears. "Fifty euros and a gift card. Look—"

"Listen, you mean."

For once, the classmate managed to ignore it in favor of their point. "Get me my test fixed. Today. Dr. Newmann, chemistry. I need at least an 85. Or God help you, I'll beat your face in with a rake and shove it up your ass."

"Too much Netflix, I take it," he snarked. They didn't appreciate the humor, so he moved on. "I'll get it. Later."

" _Today_."

Darcy swayed inside the toilet stall. He pressed his cheek against the stall wall, using it and his face to hold the phone upright. "Yes, kingpin, today. When I'm physically capable of taking it."

"You couldn't physically take a paper doll."

"Well, you couldn't take a test."

"Do it, bitch," they snapped all the way up to the hum of their dial tone.

Darcy finished up his business. He snapped his last button up in place, plucked his phone off the wall and headed out to wash his hands, all the while mumbling to himself. "Of course, Jesse Pinkman..."

As was to be expected, the station was still bustling. People weaved and swerved their carts through the crowd, paying little mind to anything but their destination. They were so preoccupied that Darcy doubted anyone would spot him as he nudged his way down a nearby escalator, strolling past people who lacked the sense of time to walk down moving stairs. They also wouldn't look as he rushed up to the Starbucks counter and rejoined the waiting crowd.

"Taylor!" one of the smocked-baristas shouted. "Taylor!" At the second call, a head popped through the crowd, outstretched a hand and claimed their drink.

Darcy let his hands settle in his pockets and let out a puff of air, rustling his hair aside. He rocked back to the heels of his feet to appear impatient and distracted—putting on the airs of precisely the sort of person no one would want to bother.

"Jessica!" the barista shouted. Another person nudged up to fetch her drink.

Briefly, Darcy considered grabbing his legitimate phone, where he could browse the internet in peace. He started to reach his hand further in to snatch it, but stopped to observe the barista again.

"Alice! Alice!" they called. No one moved, so they set the drink down and began the cycle anew, calling this time for "Ricky!"

As Darcy was turning to check the line, the glimmer of a red badge approached through his peripheral vision. It was tiny and, to most, non-descript—a simple golden P emblazoned into the shape of a maroon shield, affixed to the lapel of a stranger's pea coat. The coat's wearer had shoulder-length, straight red hair and the sort of polished posture that would've impressed his mother. The sight of this stranger curled his left lip with the tiny satisfaction of knowing something no one else would. That was a Hogwarts prefect badge.

Had he any sense of consideration, Darcy would have left the stand completely. Instead, he watched where the girl chose to settle, directly in front of the care not to bump anyone leaving with a drink, Darcy outstretched his left hand and moved it ahead of him, feeling his way into an open spot. He continued through the small cluster all the way over to a few diagonal steps away from the red haired girl's back. His eyes slanted knowingly towards her shoulder, back to the pin once more.

"Mass production, so quaint. You'll miss it in Scotland," he remarked.

The girl's head turned on a swivel, snapping over to his direction in unison with an uppity "excuse me?" worthy of her stance. "Do I know you?"

"If you're asking, I'd think it obvious," Darcy dismissed.

Her eyebrows furrowed, wrinkling her forehead so drastically that not even her fringe could block the sight. "Fine. Am I supposed to know you? As in, have we met?"

Darcy shrugged. "I've met people like you. Except they were subtle."

"Henry?" the barista called over them.

Another man started to move through the crowd. Darcy took a step forward and turned, creating more space at the counter. He had also blatantly crowded this girl, but leaning in seemed to help with the effect. It also gave him the space to reach straight for her lapel.

Darcy pinched the pin between his fingers, pulling the collar of her jacket up. "Literal badge of honor. Flashy. The barnyard school's so proud."

Just as his fingers were wrapping around the pin, the girl grabbed his hand with both of hers and pushed it away. "It's my father's."

Darcy gestured to twist his hand out of her grasp. "Flashy _and_ deceptive, then." Her grip stayed secure, restraining him. He jostled his hand again to no real progress. "Not to mention distrusting. This is such a great package," he taunted as innocuously as one could taunt anything.

Her sigh managed the feat of being even more exasperated than his mother's. "What, exactly, is your problem?"

"Parental neglect and recurring obsessive urges to commit mass murder."

If it did nothing else, it had still given the girl beside him pause. She stared at him at a loss for words.

"Will!" the barista interjected. Darcy turned towards the crowd, checking for signs of movement.

The lack of eye contact gave the girl a bit of time to adjust. Her head tilted to her right side, causing her hair to sway along with it. "Has anyone ever told you to see a therapist?" she asked, at the point of sounding more genuinely concerned than insulted.

"You know what those are? In Scotland?" he emphasized the word to indicate he really meant 'In the Wizarding World', "They must be awful." Darcy's smirk almost cracked into a smile at the mental image of a wizard in a pointed hat and wand studying Freud.

As far as Darcy could tell, no one else was moving when the barista called for "Will?" again.

Darcy reached those extra few centimeters over the counter to grab the stray cup, turned to the girl and raised it to her in what would have been a cheer if she'd received her drink yet. "But yes. They have. Often."

"You really should listen."

Darcy turned his back to the girl. He took a sip from the stranger's drink, struggled not to sputter at the shocking sweetness, swallowed, and gave as casual a taunt back as he could. "If you conjure my prescription, maybe."

He hadn't made it more than five steps from the counter when the barista called out "Rose!"

The name itself hadn't bothered him at all, but the "thank you," in the magic red-head's voice had given him reason to glimpse back. He watched her reflection marching alng behind him, her stride widening with determination to catch right back up to Darcy's side.

Darcy lowered his head into his mystery drink, trying to ignore the world in artificial sweeteners. She wouldn't have anything of it.

"In seriousness, Will. Provided you know what serious means, if you meant a word of that, find help," she suggested, managing a pitch of authoritative concern that made Darcy's left eyebrow twitch on reflex.

He waited until Rose was a few steps ahead of him before calling at her back. "Yeah, well, hakuna matata, princess Nala" He could only hope that witches still watched Disney movies, or that would've been total gibberish to Rose. (It was).

The stroll back to the platform was a long one. Had Darcy picked a different restroom and coffee shop, he could've been back in a matter of minutes. Instead, he'd positioned himself so that he'd needed to walk adjacent to platform 8 for most of its lengths before finally spotting platforms 9 through 11.

It didn't take a particularly keen eye to spot his family and the over-packed trolley between them. The bug-eyed woman he had to call mum and the looming bolder on two legs that was his dad were each standing to the opposite side of his cherubly chubby little brother, forcefully oblivious to the other's existence in favor of their darling little boy. Recently, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley had started the process of their divorce. They were currently the type of separated where the alternative option was a double homicide.

"And make sure you play nice with your little friends. There's a calendar I tucked in Robinson Crusoe. You can use it to write down their birthdays, and let me know when they are. Then, I can send you presents for them," Colleen cooed into Atticus' right ear. She wrapped both of her hands firmly around his shoulders, on the verge of restraining him with a snake-like yet cheerful grip.

Dudley knelt at the opposite side, clearly making no efforts at touching nor smothering whatsoever. Instead, he'd settled on the knowing half-nod of distant parenting, and his version of advice. "Some moron gives you trouble, find a stick and smack 'em. Shows authority."

Colleen's eyes snapped open. They flashed over to Dudley first, shooting him a look ordinarily meant for disapproving witnesses to patients in an asylum. "No, no, no no no… Don't listen to daddy, dear, that's not how smart people solve problems." She switched right back to sugary cheer and gave Atticus another squeeze.

"Smart people get beat up. Hit them once. If it's a good hit, they leave you alone," Dudley repeated, ignoring Colleen right back.

Again, Colleen lifted her eyes in scolding. "Dudley! How can you say that? We're setting an example for the rest of his entire life, both of us barely see him, and heaven knows what he's learning up at that school. The least you can do is—"

He interrupted her attempt at an argument with his own. "It works."

As Darcy continued to approach the group, he wondered if it was his imagination, or if Atticus was truly turning a shade of white typically reserved for paper. Somehow, Colleen found it in her abilities to squeeze Atticus tighter, pulling him nudges away from Dudley in the process. "How can you say that to him? Even if that were true, which, that's only in prison that's true, he can't hear that! He can't hurt someone! He's a little boy." One of her arms coiled further up Atticus' head, pulling her violet nails through his sandy blonde curls with overbearing affection. "My little boy. And he's yours too, last I checked, or did you change your mind on that?"

"He's twelve."

Colleen flung her hands off Atticus so she could start gesturing them at Dudley in various, almost-yet-not-quite-threatening ways. "Twelve is little! Look at his head! It's tiny, yet still disproportionate to the rest of him. Which means small. Dis-pro-por-tion-ate means it's small. Have you ever read a book I didn't give you?"

"Most twelve-year-olds are jerks! I was!"

"Jesus Christ, Dudley! Shut your mouth and listen—!"

While his parents continued to argue between platforms nine and ten, and some of Atticus' classmates walked around him, Atticus stood still, completely dumbfounded. His slightly-disproportionate eyes swelled more than usual, glistening at the precipice of crying. He blinked as many times as he could in quick succession, trying and struggling to hold potential tears at bay. He braced to speak up, but only managed a hiccup.

Darcy, on the other hand, could barely notice his parents arguing at this point. He'd heard them so much by now, they were the equivalent of the world's angriest nature sounds cd. He walked around the circle of family, grabbed Atticus' cart and yanked it back.

"Oi, Finch. Forget to pack the castle?" Darcy called over the stack of stuff.

Atticus gazed up at his older brother with what he meant to be forceful bravery, but, in the end, seemed more like another hiccup with the faintest resemblance to his name.

Darcy stepped to the left of the item pile. Atticus grabbed him by the leg and hugged on tight enough that, had Atticus been the slightest bit bigger, it could have just as easily been an attempt to strangle him.

At first, Darcy flinched. He forced himself into a state of near calm and plopped his hand on Atticus' head, tangling his hair about. "Seriously, be good. If you think me or dad would do it, don't. If mum would do it, probably not that, either."

"But what about breathing?" Atticus meant to joke back. It was still a joke, technically, but it lost some of its effectiveness when Darcy heard the crackling of near-tears.

Darcy bent over at the waist, lowering himself so that he could talk as close to eye level as possible. "We don't think about breathing. Unless we're underwater. And if you are, then breathing is drowning, and you also shouldn't do that, so, breathe mainly when you don't have to think about it. Okay?"

"Not really?" Atticus guessed, unsure of what he even could say. His head started drifting towards the floor.

Darcy tilted slightly to his left, angling himself so that he looked like he was on bended knee without doing so. "That's normal. This sucks. It'll keep sucking. But we're alive. We're here. And we want you to learn how to not explode the world, and have fun with cousin Lily. Okay?"

Atticus squinted, clearly not understanding what his brother wanted to hear. He guessed in the direction of honesty, giving a doubtful "nope?" in reply.

Darcy bobbed his head. "Perfect." He glimpsed over at the nearest clock. They had a good fifteen minutes before Atticus was due on the train—but more importantly, the clock was angled far enough away from the Dursley parents that they'd have to put forth an effort to see it.

Darcy pushed back on Atticus' cart, positioning it so he'd not be too far off in line to load on the platform. "Mum? Dad?" Darcy tried to call for their attention while standing up to his feet. Neither bothered to look. Darcy cleared his throat and tried a little more specifically. "It's five to eleven. Atticus is leaving."

The moment 'Atticus' got mentioned, Colleen seemed to spring to attention. "Darcy! Yes," Colleen stopped wagging her finger in Dudley's face in favor of crouching back down to Atticus and entrapping him in another hug. Atticus raised his hands the slight bit he could so he could mime a hug back through her grip. "Oh, Atty! Make sure you write. Mummy'll miss you. I love you so, so much, no one can love you more!"

Comfortable in the assumption his mum would ignore him for now, Darcy started to take a step back. He had been just about to take another sip of his stolen coffee when he spotted Rose's re-appropriated prefect badge from the corner of his eye. She glanced back at him with hostile suspicion, her eyes stating something she didn't have the time to convey in words before passing through the platform. She'd heard Colleen call his name.

Oh, well. Some witch Atticus went to school with possibly suspected Darcy stole another man's coffee. Darcy had done worse things. Hell, he planned to do worse things this afternoon.

With the self-assurance given, Darcy turned his back on the platform and his family. He reached into his pocket for his phone and walked away with disinterest. "Taking the train."

It was a mild surprise to Darcy that he'd heard a response back at all. His father had found it in him to give a quick order. "Text once you're there."

Darcy raised his right hand and gave a wave behind him. "Got it." He'd made sure to leave before his parents knew he was lying.


	3. Lying Low

In Darcy's experience, people drastically over-estimated the difficulty of lying.

Darcy forged his mother's signature on a note and brought it to the front office. The secretary exchanged his lined, cursive stationary excuse for a neon orange late slip and shooed him off. For the sake of his plans, Darcy chose to interpret that as 'go to the chemistry classroom'.

Darcy knocked his boot against the bottom corner of the classroom door. It stood silent, almost foreboding in its stillness. He yanked the knob and kicked it, shoving it open.

"Ms. Parker," Darcy whispered while surveying the room. The fluorescent beams had been shut off, casting a slight tint of the cloudy daylight's gray over her giant table of elements. He waited for an answer, yet only an echo called back. He took a step inside. "Can you never install security? Thanks."

Given the lack of reply, Darcy let himself in and over to Ms. Parker's desk. He took a picture of the clutter with his phone to reference later, compared it with the desk ahead, and started rummaging across the calendar. Soon enough, he spotted the stack of tests piled in neat, alphabetical order.

Darcy nudged the other set of documents to his right, scattering them just enough that, if someone were to approach, he could pretend he'd been searching for his homework. With that situated, he flipped through the stack, first for the name of someone smart, then for Alan's, and, finally, for a blank copy of the year 11 chemistry exam. Darcy forged Alan's name on it and got to work, copying about 95 percent of the presumed right answers off one of the top students' exams, and the occasional wrong one back off Alan's.

By the time he had two pages left, Darcy swore he heard talking down the hall. He reached for his day planner, slapped it down over the test he'd been copying and braced to give his defense at the door. "Ms. Parker?" he called quietly. The footsteps continued past the door.

Darcy's hands slid back from the page of what he should've been writing on to what he genuinely would. He pried out both the spare and the true test's staples to switch out their essay pages, pinched the new test's staple shut by hand and tucked the doctored test back into the pile.

Darcy double-checked his smart phone with the desk to ensure the mess was as he'd found it, and then deleted the picture. He noted the lesson plan on the board behind him, scrawled down the night's reading and left.

The hallways were as desolate as they'd been ten minutes ago. It took at least another three before he'd passed someone heading the opposite direction. To be specific, it was the floppy ponytail and garish tablecloth-evoking floral dress of the person he'd expected a while ago.

"Ms. Parker," Darcy called, "Just looking for you. I miss anything but the reading?"

"Not at all, I got your paper topic yesterday, so, we're set. Unless you'd count missing eating. Then, I'd suppose, missing a lot," Ms. Parker raised her paper bag of takeout back at him and rustled it in his general direction.

"Not part of chemistry." Darcy forced his slightest smile back at her all the same—not because he was anywhere remotely reminiscent of amused, but because she wouldn't question him.

Ms. Parker's smile shone back at him to such an extent, he imagined the sun felt exhausted on her beams' behalf. "Digestive enzymes might have something to argue with, then. Chemistry is everywhere!"

Darcy forced his smile for half a second longer. "Except between me and Paige Whitley."

"Great topic element, by the way. Never had anyone pick Francium! If you've got trouble finding research, tell me. I'll help!"

"Sure," he lied.

Her smile softened a bit with persistent contentment, and quite possibly from the promise of lunch. "And please, try to behave! Fight ideas, not people."

Darcy nodded shallowly and left before she could add something else. He had a client to reach.

In the dozens of months they'd spent in each other's school districts, Alan Barnard hadn't once changed his seating preference. Every day, he perched slightly to the left side of the center, as if the capacity to watch everyone made him lord of lunches. While woefully predictable, this made him easy to find.

Darcy walked himself and his stack of innocuous books to the left side of the lunch room. He waited and watched for a sign that, contrary to initial belief, eventually did come. Alan stepped up from the lunch table with his empty tray in hand.

At that cue, Darcy opened up his homework planner to find the discarded exam. He tucked his books under his arm, freeing his hands just enough that he could crumple and rustle Alan's stolen test papers up into a little ball. He paced towards the rubbish bin, matching Alan's steps.

Just as Alan was tipping his lunch tray into the bin's mouth, Darcy tossed the paper up with his left hand, miming a basketball shot. One might presume he'd meant the paper to land in the bin. Instead, the soft wad of poor study habits squished lightly into Alan's bulging eyed, squashed-nosed face.

Considering the seemingly frustrated "dammit" and immediate twist to look away from Alan, Darcy decided to feign ignorance. He raised both of his hands palms-outward on each side of his head, miming surrender. "Sorry. My fault, entirely. Mind picking that up?"

Alan's back cracked audibly as he stood. He rolled his shoulders back, puffing out his chest in a manner somewhere between a gorilla and a factory-bred chicken. "Yes, I mind. It's your mess!"

Darcy let out a puff of his own, hiding an impatient sigh to accompany a reluctant "of course". He bent down, picked up the paper ball, mimed dropping it in the bin and retracted his hand sideways, shoving the crumpled pages at the top of Alan's shirt.

"What the hell're ya—" Alan's start at an argument faded out when he finally spotted the word inside the paper. With a quick glower, he shoved his empty lunch tray at Darcy's chest, pushing him back, and put the test into his pocket. "Grimy little bastard."

Darcy twirled the lunch tray between his hands. "Three days no interest. By the fourth… don't wait for the fourth."

Alan flung his now-open arm around Darcy's shoulder, reeling Darcy towards him and the lunch room doors. He was thankfully too preoccupied with speaking and spitting at the same time to notice Darcy flinching. "Really, man. How'd you do this shit?" he asked once they hit the hallway.

Darcy thrust his left hand back into the air again and shook it dramatically, rustling his planner's pages in the process. "Magic."

"Yeah. That's also shit."

Darcy smirked back. "Shouldn't shit comes to arseholes by nature?"

Alan came to a full stop. A flash of realization stretched his eyebrows to his forehead, as if this he'd just heard the most profound thing he'd ever know.

Darcy used this opportunity to grab Alan's wrist and pry the older student off of him. He tilted to the left to limbo under Alan's remaining arm and through to the drably tiled corridor. Darcy raised his hand one more time, pulling Alan's hand along in the gesture of pointing at Alan's torso. "Miracles have a cost. This one's cash only."

Alan pushed back. He took as broad of a step as he could muster, shoving his way into the hall. "Save the fregging lines for English class."

Darcy shook his head slightly and accepted the insult in a literal stride. As well as Darcy knew Alan's schedule, he doubted Alan had realized Darcy's next class was, indeed, English.

Mere seconds before the clock struck one, Darcy slid into his seat at the back right corner of Mr. Cromwell's English class. He flipped open a notebook, folded both arms along the ledge of his desk and slumped down in a drowsy stupor. Faintly, he recognized the rules of colorful essay writing their teacher meant to impart. Unfortunately for his teacher, no matter how enthusiastically they explained that definitively and definitely were definitively determined to definitely be two distinct words, the lecture couldn't compete against the post-caffeine slump.

Had he been left alone, Darcy may have stayed still through the entire lecture. However, like most conditional statements, it was phrased as such because the event referred to was far from what happened. Instead, after most of the class had long passed, someone kicked at his foot.

By reflex, Darcy's eyes flashed open. His head bobbed upwards and his shoulders pushed back with a moment of awareness, only to quickly drift back to the floor. Then, they kicked harder.

Darcy's head turned towards the source. In doing so, he forced himself to see the not particularly unwelcome sight of almond eyes and a black and crimson argyle baseball jersey. As soon as he spotted the girl to his right, she flipped her notebook to flash a drawing of an eye, a lump and a sheep in Darcy's direction. Strange as the combination was, his imagination could still one up even the most punk rock of doodling optometrist baseball playing bakers, so he let himself slump down once more.

It wasn't as if Darcy had no idea who was attempting to speak to him. Liv Hollender was a minor legend of the sophomore class. Between her garage band, drastically older boyfriends, and gigantic yet well sculpted eyebrows on an otherwise dainty face, she was one sudden illness away from the quirky female lead of a YA romance. She was also as persistent as unsalted slug guts. That being the case, he really should've expected she would start talking.

"Dare," she whispered while prodding his leg. "Dare-cy. Truth or. C'mon. I'll pay. Dare!"

The repetitive knocking of her doc martens on his leg sent a repeated twitch through his left eye. By the third knock, it was inevitable. He'd have to talk to her.

Darcy reached into his pocket for his smartphone. He typed a message into the notepad mode, waited for the teacher to start scrawling about another common set of misplaced words in essays ("they're wrong about their use of that word, right there!") and discreetly passed his phone under the desk.

Darcy could tell Liv had gotten the message he'd typed for her to ' _make an offer'_ , both because she'd snatched it from his hands, and she was clearly staring down at her lap. Thankfully, the teacher was too impassioned about the proper use of pronouns to notice Liv's concentrated yet fumbling typing back.

Ninety five seconds of slouching later, Darcy felt his phone brush through his jeans at his leg. He wrapped his palm around the phone, pulled it to the highest part of his thigh and read the message silently.

' _You can't refuse? Steal for me. I'm playing the Wallington. My psycho ex is stalking my shows. With blackmail for good, horrible measure. I need help getting pics back and scaring him off. Pay 60 plus drinks. No touchy-feely._ '

Darcy looked down at her message for maybe five seconds. He deleted the note, opened a new one and passed it right back. _'I could refuse'_.

Liv picked his phone up a bit further, moving it from under the desk to directly on top of her textbook. She craned her neck to speak towards Darcy's ear. "How? In a million lightyears. Really, truly."

Liv pressed her hand directly over his mobile's screen. She eyed him expectantly, implying that he'd have to talk. If only to spite her, Darcy scrawled a message on one page of his notebook and slid it across his desk, tilting the page towards her so she could read _'I'm grounded and your music'll blow acoustic. Eighty.'_

Liv lowered her hand to swat at Darcy under his seat, then pouted. "Oh my god. For a woman's safety? You cheap arse."

Darcy pulled the paper close just long enough to write back. _'Expensive arse.'_

"No. Or. Eh, at least you know you're horrible…" Liv sighed. She rocked back in her seat and looked away from Darcy. "Fine. Sixty two. Which's all I've got until Christmas, so, there's nowhere to go but down or to pray to Santa," she relented.

"Won't work. Didn't you hear? Upon physical contact with me, Santa's presents immediately turn to coal."

"Nope. How can I hear someone who won't talk? But, to your credit, that's the worst mutant power I've ever heard."

"Should've see it in Victorian England. Better profit than Ms. Lovett's meat pies."

A tiny, soggy wad of paper splattered on Darcy's arm. He looked to Liv, who was sitting by innocuously. Liv's eyes drifted with her mind, up towards the ceiling. "I think my power'd be—"

Darcy pinched the spit ball between his fingers and dropped it to the floor. "Silence?" Another spitball smacked the back of his neck.

Liv failed to notice. "Nope, I'm talking—" at least, she had been until the bell rang.

The teacher shouted something at the rest of the class. Darcy supposed it was a pun. He mimicked a reluctant smirk and began to gather his things—starting with his phone on Liv's desk, which he snatched up as quickly as possible.

Liv's head tilted slightly to her right side, signaling her question before she got to verbalize it. Darcy pocketed his phone. "Send the address," he stated.

Liv snatched her messenger bag up by the strap and hoisted it overhead. She stepped backwards over her chair, backing away while still making eye contact. "Bye, Darling. You won't regret it!" she waved enthusiastically.

She had barely been out of the room for five seconds when she was already proven wrong.

While Darcy had pretended to busy himself gathering his things, one of the other inattentive students had lumbered from their seat towards the back of the room. His voice smashed through still air, placing every ounce of effort he could into projecting authority. "What d'you think you're doing, bothering my girl?" his upper lip sneered, yet the lower one managed to stay perfectly still, flashing his crooked teeth and the blue-studded braces struggling to fix them.

Darcy kept his expression as blasé as the threat. "Speaking in English?"

"Then shut up. Don't do it again, or you'll know why you shouldn't have." The classmate jabbed their finger into Darcy's shoulder, prodding him back.

Darcy swatted at the finger on principle, but with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, making his gesture more of a limp flop. "Listen. She talked to me. And unless you're her undercover parole officer? Not your business."

"Yeah. It is. She's mine. So I make sure she doesn't deal with dipshits like you. So back off." He poked Darcy again, as if pressing an invisible button.

"I, do love to tell you, deeds for people stopped working in the eighteen hundreds."

The classmate cracked his knuckles towards Darcy's face, swaying his shadow further over him. "Swear to God, freak, one more word at her, I'll kill you."

"Really?" Darcy asked, pretending to be genuinely incredulous. He wasn't, of course, but it sounded like a good distraction.

For about ten seconds, it was. His classmate had started to explain "yeah, really," while making an effort to stare him down. Darcy took those few speaking seconds to take one long stride to his right and step around him.

By the eleventh second, the guy had caught on. He lengthened his stride to make up for Darcy's head start, following him out into the hallway. "Get back here! We're not done."

"Of course we're not," Darcy made a point of not slowing down. He clutched the strap of his messenger bag tight to his chest, holding it in place so he could search for something to defend himself with. He let his mouth sprint ahead of him, spurting out the first distracting threats to come to mind. "You'll keep heckling me over talking at a girl who wants nothing to do with you, tomorrow night in dissociated rage, I'll break into your room and water-board you with Coca-Cola, then—"

In all of Darcy's impassioned storytelling, he'd failed to notice the classmate lob a hardcover class copy of _Crime and Punishment_ straight at his face. The cover smacked him at the side of the cheek, stinging considerably.

Darcy fumbled to grab the book and pivoted towards its source just in time to notice the lunging fist following it. "Stay the hell away from her!"

Darcy rushed to side-step the punch and narrowly succeeded. The book fell from his grasp, plopping to the floor.

With his right hand, Darcy grabbed for the classmate's shoulder, seeming to shove him away. The classmate grabbed that hand and pinned it to the wall. He pressed closer still, hoisting Darcy up with a rattling clank against locker doors.

As the classmate reeled his fist back for another punch, Darcy snaked his left hand under the classmate's lunging arm. The lower palm of Darcy's hand shoved upwards across the classmate's face and straight under his nose, smashing the bridge of it so far, he practically shook from the accompanying hybrid of a shriek and growl.

Darcy unfurled the strap of his messenger bag from around his shoulder. He hoisted the flat, book-filled bag over both of their heads and smashed it against his classmate's head repeatedly. Crouching and leaning against the wall in pain, the classmate reached a flailing hand for Darcy's throat. Instead, he grabbed Darcy's right arm and yanked Darcy down.

Darcy fell with the grace of a boulder in a swimming pool and landed straight on his back. The classmate hunched over Darcy's body. He stomped his foot straight on Darcy's chest and ground the sole of his shoe in. "Goddamn cockroach."

While the classmate was busy enjoying his assumed victory, Darcy picked up the fallen textbook and smashed it into the classmate's ankle. The classmate wobbled, leaning into the wall. From the terrible angle, Darcy would've sworn he could see straight up the guy's bloodied nose. He also would've sworn in general had he not seen Mr. Cromwell bursting out of his classroom doors.

"Travis! Darcy! Main office!" Mr. Cromwell yelled at the both of them. He called out at the other passing students for anyone unimportant enough to reply. "Can someone fetch the nurse?"

The classmate, presumably Travis, stomped one extra footprint to Darcy's face. Darcy grabbed the bottom of Travis' boot and pulled straight down, holding him, or at the very least, the shoe, at the most awkward angle possible.

Given how obviously terrible a fight in the hallway was, Darcy opted not to speak. Travis, alternatively, didn't.

"You don't get it! This psycho, he's a—" Travis stuttered to mask nearly cursing at a teacher, and brushed his hand under his blood-strewn, swelling nose. He retracted with a pained wince. "He'll kill someone. He told me, straight up, I swear!"

"You can give your excuses to the head teacher."

"But, he—"

"Don't start your sentence with a conjunction!"

One long chat with the head teacher later, Darcy and Travis had both been suspended. The head teacher gave the obligatory lecture about the school's no-tolerance policies and how violence was never acceptable. They then sent the pair back to the bench outside to wait for their parents.

Darcy pressed the progressively squishier paper-towel-wrapped ice pack against the back of his head. He slumped back against the wall, angling himself so that the mush was sandwiched between plaster and his skull. A second, wet cloth was balancing on his swelling eye. With his hands free, he plucked Travis' copy of _Crime and Punishment_ from his messenger bag and pretended to read.

For a particularly terrible twenty seconds, Travis had been seated on the opposite bench, staring Darcy down with an escalating rage. In the one small act of mercy the universe would grant him, Travis' parents hadn't taken long to get to school. Hardly three minutes had passed before they gathered Travis and headed back to the head teacher. A dull roar of arguments trickled through the door frame. Shortly thereafter, Travis and his immediate ancestors wandered back out, no less frustrated. Travis' parents busied themselves scolding him. Travis, who clearly wasn't listening, spared one last second to furrow his eyebrows threateningly at Darcy. Of all the body parts to threaten others with, eyebrows weren't especially adept at this, so Darcy opted to ignore him.

It took over two hours for the broad, blocky shadow of Darcy's father to arrive outside the main office. By that point, the cold against Darcy's head felt more like a hat made from the goopy part of a lava lamp, and his attention was firmly on the book he was now genuinely reading.

"They want to talk to you," Darcy stated glumly.

Dudley put his hand on top of the book, pulling it aside. Darcy swayed towards the pages, standing crookedly from the bench while reaching for it.

"They hear of phones?" Dudley asked, sounding snippy and a twinge impatient, but not necessarily angry.

"Supposedly."

"Come on. We're leaving." Dudley raised the book further from Darcy's reach, crumpling a few of the pages with his crooked grip. He yanked the shoulder of Darcy's jacket, pulling him towards the way out.

Darcy stumbled to stand even halfway upright. He grit his teeth through the sudden rush to his head. He'd meant to keep his head down, but stopped when he heard his dad rustling the book's pages.

"What're you doing with this? Ignoring everyone?" he'd asked, just as much insinuating scorn for anti-social behavior as he was befuddlement at someone wanting to read.

"I smashed someone in the ankle with it."

A rumbling laugh spurted from Dudley, straight towards the back of the book. "You mean that?"

"From the swelling, fifty percent chance I broke his nose."

"You hit first?"

As tempting as it was to make a Han Solo and Greedo joke, Darcy knew his dad wouldn't get it, so he settled for boring honesty. "No."

"Use the stick next time. It'd have made your grandad proud." Dudley lowered the book-holding arm to smack it and the hand around Darcy's shoulder. As usual, Dudley failed to notice that Darcy flinched back on the first thwack. "If there's a next time. Try not to. Better not to."

"We don't carry sticks at school."

"Feh. Teachers." Dudley shoved the door open. He pushed the book back to Darcy's chest on their way out of the building. "Your mum asks, you're grounded. We'll get ice cream."

The moment the school doors smacked shut behind them, Dudley grabbed Darcy's other shoulder, pulling him to a forceful, startled stop. "Broke his nose! Didn't think you had it in you."

Darcy did his best to turn his queasy, glum uncertainty into a smile. He could barely get the right of his mouth to curl up at all, and his eyes drifted across the pavement with a stifled sigh. As weirdly accepting of violence as his dad might be, his mum would want to kill him.

In spite of that, the ice cream was delicious.


	4. Partners in Wallington Arms

Contrary to popular opinion, the Wallington had nothing to do with beef. The Wallington Arms was a pub nestled off the train stop for the town of the same name. It'd hardly taken more than half an hour for Darcy to sneak from home in Little Whinging, past the painted black panels of the Wallington's storefront and to its significantly shadier side door. The moment he'd nestled himself between a dumpster and a wall, he texted Liv a single word. 'Here'.

Darcy wasn't quite sure how long he'd been waiting for her to open that door, but one sound of her voice made it worth it.

"Hey, the—oh my god," Liv squeaked.

There was a certain hypocrisy in the shock, Darcy supposed. Liv had opened the door in a ripped, stud-covered kilt and a t-shirt with a googly-eyed cheeseburger on it, and yet she was gaping at him over fake glasses and a floppy blonde wig.

Darcy pointed a finger and his phone towards his own temple as dramatically as one could. "What do you think? I lose ten IQ points?"

"Is your plan to attract baby birds? If so, A plus."

"To pretend I can't use hair gel."

"Ok, that's. Whatever. So," Liv stepped back, holding the door open enough so that Darcy could pass by. Her eyebrows crinkled, wiggling in a distractingly caterpillar-like fashion. "Can you tell me what the plan is before I go onstage? I'll sing better knowing you're handing George his butt back."

Yes." Darcy tugged down one side of the wig, adjusting it to hide his own hairline. He waited for Liv to ask a more specific question, but she kept quiet. He returned the stare. "Not telepathically?"

Liv crossed her arms, strangling her guitar's neck in the process. "With words is nice, yeah."

Darcy took a step away from the door and towards what he presumed was the stage. As most back corridors were, the lighting was plain, the walls were dreary and the passages winding. As far as Darcy could see, there were three paths—one to the stage, one to the main dining area and one towards nowhere obvious.

Darcy turned towards nowhere. Liv trailed along. He could hear her footsteps well enough to know she was listening, and explained accordingly. "I'll link to his PIN, BTcrack his mobile and transfer-wipe his data to my netbook. Then use the findings to crack and corrupt any backups on PC."

Liv's footsteps hastened, rushing after him. "Excuse me, what?"

Darcy shrugged. "I'll hack his phone with his internet connection, take his data and crash his systems." He slowed his pace, allowing Liv to catch up.

"Through his phone?"

"Bluetooth accessibility's an unsecured micro-network. No one locks them. Same philosophy plus fifty for equipment, I could hijack and crash a ruddy car."

Darcy turned a corner and immediately was confronted by a door. He pressed his ear against the crack, checking for anything worth listening to. A few sets of footsteps and a couple of boiling pots crept their way through, but by far the loudest noise Darcy heard was Liv's voice. "Will he see you with the hacking stuff?"

Darcy raised a finger to his lips. "Doubt it."

"And you'll know the phone's his?"

"George Davis. I've got a photo and number reference. So, yeah."

Liv took a step backwards to check where Darcy was pointing. Her lips rolled inwards, and a sort of confused acceptance came over her. She glimpsed down to her wrist, checking a rose gold men's watch dangling limply over it. "Ok, I have no clue how any of that means stuff, so, you mind doing it first and telling me nothing later? I think I'm on in ten? Fifteen?"

"Wonderful. I prefer nothing."

Liv squinted at the watch's face, as if she wasn't used to reading it. She half-waved the hand still clutching her guitar. "Great. Go."

Unusual as it was, Darcy opted not to think too much about it. As far as he'd noticed of Liv, her sole consistence was in being deliberately unusual.

Darcy started to step back, but stopped when he caught sight of the kitchen window. The sanded glass circle pointing through to the dining room showed no silhouettes, but they did give a peek at an idea.

"Wait. One question. Your psycho. Are there people sitting at each table around him?"

"Pretty sure, yeah. Someone might've left? I don't know..." Liv answered.

In that case, Darcy could assume the easy version of the plan wouldn't work. Sitting down next to George and hacking in plain sight was only logical if he wasn't stealing someone else's chair. He'd have to catch him elsewhere.

"Then, at restaurants, what would he order?" Darcy asked towards the window just in time for Liv to look up from her watch.

"Chips, pizza or nachos. Does this really matter? I think I have to go, like, now?"

Darcy nudged the edge of the kitchen door. He tilted his head to peer through the new crevice, checking where the workers were standing.

"Uh, okay?" Liv glimpsed over Darcy's shoulder, struggling to see whatever he was. She gave up three seconds later and headed towards the stage.

Darcy hardly noticed. He was too absorbed watching the workers buzz around the kitchen. There was bound to be a chance to sneak in when so few people were in such a large room. All he had to do was see when no one else would see him. He could narrowly make out the waiters' attire when they picked up their orders. The uniform half-aprons were hanging in the back right corner, beside a work computer.

Darcy swung his messenger bag over his shoulder. He pulled off just enough of his shirt to tuck the strap under and pull the bag back, so it would only be visible from directly behind him. The entire time, he kept his focus ahead, staring straight through the crack by the door. He rummaged through his pocket for a small cardboard box, ensuring it was, indeed, there.

Hardly four minutes into his extended staring, Darcy heard a familiar voice muffled through multiple walls. Her words crackled through a set of speakers she'd been standing far too close to. It took a few words before her voice stopped distorting. "Hey, there, girls and otherwise. I'm Liv Hollender. This first song, I wrote to speak to the second most shared feeling among people, and that's how badly we'd really like our ex to gain seventy pounds and never talk to us again. Unless they're giving back that disc with the three action movies on it. Like, seriously, dude. Buy your own."

Whether it was fortuitously or by sheer coincidence, a few seconds after, the one chef left in the kitchen stepped out into the dining area.

The instant the opposite doors shut, Darcy pushed his way through, barging in somewhere he didn't belong as if he knew precisely why he was there. He snatched an apron from the uniform station and tied it loosely around his waist. He rushed forward towards the finished order counter, checking his pocket for a name tag on the way. No such luck. He'd deal with that, later.

A few cords passed through the swinging doors. Liv's voice called out, accompanied by the unsteady strings of her impassioned few, repetitive cords of accompaniment. "You're so jelly I could push you into a mold. You really think I should put my life on hold? I'm not a goddamn mourner, but if I…" she sang with considerably more enthusiasm than appropriate for the acoustic accompaniment, the lyrics, or the state of humanity in general.

Still walking, Darcy reached into his pocket for the box of laxatives he'd brought. He tore the paper off the box, then the paper satchel inside, and then tucked the open pouch up his sleeve. Just as he was finishing the slip, the circle-windowed doors swung open, and the chef plodded back inside. Darcy raised the hand he'd just been using with a needlessly pleasant "hey." He grabbed a plate of nachos with salsa off the prepared food counter, and casually pushed ahead into the restaurant.

The room lit up with its uniform brightness, as if the whole place had been covered by a golden photo filter. From chairs to couches to the curtain-bordered stage, the building radiated the comforts of a family room lost fifty years ago in a time machine accident. Darcy didn't have long to stand around without arousing suspicion, so he paced slowly onwards with the nachos in both hands. He angled the plate to hide his lack of a name tag.

The man Darcy had seen in the picture was scraggly, gaunt, and put little effort into not appearing that he'd recently swam through a sewer. In what was otherwise a family-friendly establishment proper enough to be described with the word 'establishment', Greg and his compatriots clearly stood out. A table of two men towards the farther end of the room had both angled their heads towards Liv. They weren't speaking. One wore an oversized letterman jacket and black lipstick, and was generally proportioned like a clean-shaven garden gnome. His presumed friend, the scraggly-faced man, was even more like a skeleton with hair in person than his picture implied.

Darcy intentionally walked straight past the crowd, until he could get himself lost behind a piece of décor—namely, a wide, standing lamp. He bent over as if going to fix his shoe. Instead, he tilted his sleeve down to pour the powder in the salsa. He stirred it quickly with his finger while keeping his angle low enough to hide it, then popped back up.

Darcy put on his best lying grin and strode quickly towards the table of two, particularly the presumed George. He shifted the tray of nachos in his grasp, tilting them just enough to hide his non-existent name tag. "Sorry! Missed you, there. Seeing you, I mean, sorry I didn't see you!" he called for their attention, consciously altering his pattern of speech.

The gnome-like man lifted his head immediately, watching the food tray. Darcy slid it gently to the center of the table and gave him another, fake smile. "Your waitress'll be back with the entrées as soon as they're up. In the meanwhile, enjoy! If you need anything else, I'm Carl!" He clasped his hands by his chest with more pretend enthusiasm. "And if you don't, still Carl."

Only now did the gaunt man look from the stage to see what had happened. The bridge of presumed George's nose wrinkled with what might've been suspicion, or possibly an itch. In either case, it seemed best to go.

"Oi, Carl, where's my beer?" the gaunt man questioned, teetering between plain irritable and full-out hostility.

Darcy's smile faded an intimidate smidge. He pointed to one side, rushing his excuse. "At the bar. I mean. Your waitress' getting it. From the bar. Should be here shortly!"

The gaunt man grunted, dissatisfied, and turned back towards the stage. Darcy accepted the opportunity and strode briskly away, feigning an extra, obnoxious spring in his step to cement the impression he was totally oblivious. He had no clue if they'd ordered the food, but, if he acted dumb enough, even if they hadn't, he hoped they'd assume it a lucky mistake and eat it regardless.

Darcy passed by the stage, some tables, the bar, more tables, and, at one point, a family raising their hands that likely needed a waiter. Darcy pretended not to see. He walked straight out the front door to the pavement, around a corner, then another corner, and, once he was sure he'd seen no one for the entire stroll, doubled back to sneak into a shrub by the men's restroom window.

Once successfully crouched down, Darcy untied his apron. He pulled his messenger bag around, fished out his netbook and propped it up on his knees. He clicked through the loading screen and into the detection program.

All things considered, finding George's phone was a lot easier than it should have been. One check at Darcy's Bluetooth radar later, he could see eleven Bluetooth-accessible devices in the restaurant's radius. Based on where George was sitting, towards the back of the restaurant, Darcy could infer which of the device dots belonged to him. Darcy noted the randomized name of that particular connection '90895428697', just in case he were to lose track of it. He propped his mobile against his lower leg, balancing it near the keyboard, and kept one finger by his touchpad.

The trickiest part of this was the timing. George's connection was temporarily offline, so to turn it on, Darcy would have to call. He'd also have to be in a close enough radius for the phone to mistake his netbook's application for a Bluetooth accessory to establish the connection. In the more immediate sense, this left Darcy with one thing he could do and another that he could hope for. Wait, and believe those strangers would eat those nachos.

One thing most people neglected to consider when contemplating radar devices was that they weren't especially entertaining. It was a bit like watching a live stream of a dartboard no drunk people were using—thoroughly boring. It didn't help matters that, about five minutes in, someone opened a bathroom window so they could smoke.

Darcy covered his mouth with his sleeve and huddled towards the screen, ignoring the pungent, bitter smell as best he could, which happened to be not at all. He gagged silently on the air, hoping in vain that, perhaps he could simply spit out the flavor of eating wood and sour, rotting flowers that kept sneaking through his nose.

The monotony of waiting by a blue screen and smelling a terrible smell weighed down on Darcy. For such an uncomfortable place, he was becoming strangely tempted to lie down. He blinked in rapid succession, struggling to motivate his eyes into cooperation. Whatever illicit thing was drifting out the window, maybe it was getting to him.

With that idea as loosely in mind, Darcy gripped his netbook and swayed to his knees, angling away from the window. He hobbled to stand, but, before he could move, something else moved first. George's radar blip inched across the target field, drifting into range.

Darcy's fingers drifted across his mobile screen accordingly, retrieving the text message of George's number he had Liv send to his burner phone. His joints stiffened sorely around the phone's plastic shell. He meant to click the number and press call, but his thumb locked in place. His muscles seared, as if he'd just finished a triathlon and was as under-prepared as he would genuinely have been to complete one.

Again, Darcy tried to consider what could possibly have been happening. These were less symptoms of a drug than of a poison, yet he couldn't think of an instance where he could've absorbed one that didn't involve this window. He'd have considered it for longer had he not heard a thick, rapid bubbling through his increasingly muffled ears.

The rising smoke intensified, streaming out in a pillar from a widening gap. When Darcy turned to look, he could hardly make out a scene through the faintly lilac-tinted cloud. The glass on the bathroom window was literally boiling. Leaves crinkled overhead, crisping, drying and dissolving away at the smoke's intensifying touch. Darcy's mind told him to duck, turn, cover his nose, or do anything he possibly could to move away. His feet managed little more than a shuffled stumbling towards the trunk of a now-barren tree. His eyes, which should have snapped shut, lagged even in flinching.

By the time his eyelids fell, Darcy felt something else pushing up his sleeve. Bark scraped the back of his neck, scratching him forward into consciousness. When he finally managed to look, his hands had frozen against the base of his keyboard. The screen had turned black, and the power button glowed with the faint orange of sleep mode. More importantly, a red cloaked figure was squeezing his throat.

The bump of the figure's nose, covered by the tattered fabric, was so close to Darcy's eyes that it formed a splotchy, scarlet blob in the center of his view. They turned to peer at two, smaller red blobs in the short distance behind them. What he was saying, Darcy wasn't sure. Each syllable may as well have been screamed through a cardboard tube stuffed with cotton balls. "Where, hrm mrhmhm port and key!" was the closest it translated to.

"I throw out you hrm hit, hipr mit," a slightly higher pitch squealed back.

It may have been less disorienting to hear nothing at all. Granted, it would also have been less disorienting to not have been quite possibly hallucinating a gang of sheet ghosts who'd lost their most recent brawl with the laundry.

"Prhrm you mores hut, I doom my sand," the first figure couldn't possibly have said, yet that was what Darcy's brain decided to hear.

In spite of all of the confusion, there remained two parts of the circumstance Darcy could comprehend. He needed to leave. Also, the slight bump under the upright sphere of fabric was clearly this person's nose.

As quickly as he could, Darcy raised two aching fingers to plunge slightly above and to each side of the bump. What he meant was to strike the figure's eyes. What he felt was a tighter pull on his larynx and the absence air he was no longer breathing.

Darcy wheezed against the force at his throat. His eyelids sank against his will once more. Rather than strain to open them, he jerked forward, smacking his forehead against the closest cloaked figure's face. The muted pain shot through him.

When he'd opened his eyes again, the sky seemed white, the stars absorbed in black, and every color inverted with them. A blurry, blue tattered cloak billowed on each side of him. The third figure's hood fell crooked from their face. They raised a small, thin stick towards the center of his forehead and screamed. "Stupefy!"

Suddenly, even in Darcy's drowsy, weighted mind, a fraction of the situation clicked. Of course this made no sense. It was magic.

In spite of this, Darcy still tried to duck in what would usually be a logical way. Given how he was most of the way to sleepwalking with minimal walking involved, he barely budged, and the inverted blue beam from the figure's wand sent him slamming against the bricks.

For a moment, the muffling in Darcy's ears broke away to hear a snap in his bones. The spell melted the back of his netbook, cracking the screen and knocking it even further from his grasp. He and the broken screen crumpled to the ground, flickering in and out of functioning. His mobile blinked a few feet away.

"You div! They'll find us," a familiar voice shouted angrily. The thin figure beneath the robes which was Liv, or, more likely, whatever witch or wizard must have pretended to be her all day, snapped at her fellow cloak-wearer.

Even from this warped angle, Darcy could see the spell caster flailing their wand at Darcy. "But he's—"

The fake Liv kicked up dirt to the spell caster's cloak, knocking him back. "You think aurors won't track you in this spellhole? Wait for the bleeding potion. It isn't like muggles fight back!" She snapped her head towards the other cloak in a huff. "Gainsley?"

Darcy breathed on the back of his phone. The display stared tauntingly back at him, blinking with the possibility of calling help, if only he could move. He concentrated on his right hand, willing it to at least twitch. Unfortunately, it took the majority of Darcy's concentration to so much as keep breathing.

As the blades of orange glass drifted by that pale white sky, the lack of a life flashing past Darcy's eyes felt appropriately futile. It was the way of the world, or at least of the world he knew of, but never understood. Not a single part of his reality could ever be a whole truth. He was surrounded by magicians who could destroy everything he held dear with one enchanted word. There was a schism of power between the seen and unseen, and he was far from favored.

Still, Darcy tried to move his still hand. He wheezed through the strain, his throat tensing as he tried to gather any energy at all. The noise of breathing gave him away.

"Seriously?" The Liv impersonator turned back to Darcy, impatient as she was irate. "Screw it. Gainsley, portkey me."

Darcy stared not directly at the fake Liv or her cloak, but at the tip of that wand, wondering if he could break it. If his hands couldn't move, perhaps he could at least roll towards her feet at the last minute and knock her to his level. He tried to angle his foot, yet barely flopped a centimeter.

The dead eyes of a stranger wearing the shell of someone he almost knew dug in with an escalating rage. She directed her wand to the center of his forehead, the point at point blank range.

Before the words could come out, Darcy tried, again, to move. He knew he'd failed when she called one, unknown word. "Imperius!"

Another, almost colorless jet of light flashed ahead of him, this one so bright a black, it was essentially a firework across his entire range of sight, blinding him. He could hardly hear her agonized shriek over the echoed ringing in his eardrums. The shifts in pitch made the strangers' voices blur so thoroughly, he could barely distinguish their words.

"Oh my god, oh my god, bleeding little—My hand! My—"

"What the hell?"

"Buckley, aim!"

"You just said—"

"I said better, now!"

Something smashed against Darcy's side, smacking him face-first against the wall. What little air was left in him deflated from his lungs. Blood rushed to his head. Time stopped existing. In its place was a choir of spinning screams and a void of no senses nor feeling.

And then, contrary to his every expectation, he woke up.

The pitch-black sky full of faint white stars shone across the browned grass field. The haze of drowsiness was so thick that the next bright light in his face barely drew his eyes half-open. A stranger's wand shone three feet from his face, waving past as would an EMT's torch.

"Sir? Can you hear me?" someone started to ask. Their words echoed.

Darcy closed his eyes and turned away. His hand shook as it drifted upwards and his spine angled down, allowing him to press the back of his hand to his mouth. He meant to explain, yet struggled to stagger half of his intended word, "poor-," before gagging on his tongue.

"Your parents are safe. They know you're alive. We'll keep them protected. We'll need to escort you to the hospital?" the voice questioned slowly.

Darcy's instinct was to ask this blurry blob to elaborate, particularly in identifying their pronouns. He tried, yet the most he could do was sputter.

The blur set a hand on Darcy's shoulder, likely meaning to comfort him. He recoiled, wobbled, and flopped back against something large behind him. From the inconsistent texture, he suspected it was a tree, though he couldn't quite tell through his nausea.

"Potter!" the blob called out, their words wobbling in such a way that they seemed to be shaking something. "He's awake!"

"I'm on my way! Don't let the oblivators near him!" the distorted yet familiar voice shouted from what must have been a distance.

It took a moment of the light fading from his view for Darcy to place the familiarity outside of an awkward dinner party. "Uncle Harry? So. This what, takes for to, visit before Christmas?" his question slurred with the struggle to command the English language.

"Please, sir, don't push yourself. You're in shock," the medic cooed.

Darcy started to turn his head, both to avoid eye contact and to see what lie ahead. A few innocuous figures with silver badges and raised wands were attending to the scenery. One kept her wand pointed at the tree, coaxing its leaves to bloom anew. A second kept theirs towards the pavement, to ensure no muggles saw. A third kept the lit tip of their wand towards a trio of iron statues resting between the tree while the fourth and last, Uncle Harry, raised a spell of some sort, which flickered in midair, then fizzled to nothing.

The statues' hands and open scowls crouched over a bare patch of dried grass, their metal wands directed at something which was no longer there. A glimmer of red flashed through their eyes when the spell whirred past, yet they stayed completely still.

A sudden question rose to Darcy's mind, and fled before he heard confirmation of something he already knew. Those statues had once been a witch and two wizards, and they'd been frozen while about to attack him.

Had he one more wit about him, Darcy might have thought to ask what had happened and who had saved his life. Even he, in this state, knew enough about courtesy to realize he should have thanked them. Instead, he threw up and passed out.


	5. Oversight

As he might have been be after a night of unencumbered drinking, Darcy was mildly surprised he remembered what had happened.

From the white walls to the stiffness of the fresh-pressed cot, the sterility of the hospital room was familiar, yet, in the haze of first awakening, felt distinctly wrong. There were no beeps of heart monitors, nor odd cords stuck into his veins. A cloth divider hung around his bed, blocking off the view of anyone or anything but a faint scrolling pattern on dusty peach-tinted fabric.

Darcy tried to shoot up in his bed and instantly got a rush to the head that proved this a terrible idea. He slowly leaned back down, outstretched his right hand and brushed at the divider, pulling away just enough for him to see his surroundings.

Were it not for the wands and the bizarrely uniforms, the rows of cots seemed far more reminiscent of a World War II era hospital than a modern one. The long, lime green choir robes were issue enough for Darcy to do a second take in disbelief. He may have tried for a third, were his concentration weren't torn by the curtain parting on the other side.

"Darcy." Dudley stomped over to Darcy's bedside, stating his son's name sternly, but not quite angrily. His hands clutched the side of the cot with such force, it sent a shake through the mattress. Darcy turned his head, twisting just enough that he could confirm his father was indeed speaking to him. "How're you feeling?"

Darcy closed his eyes, casting the light back out for another second. "Is that a jolly green choir?"

"No," Dudley's strong front was betrayed by the dip in his tone, as if he couldn't quite understand what he was trying to explain. "They said they're healers. Like doctors, but, not."

"Who're greatly inspired by Kermit the Frog?" Darcy tried to joke. No one laughed. He pressed a hand over his face, blocking the light out more.

"You up to talking?"

"If it doesn't involve thought."

For once, Darcy was almost thankful for the shadow of his father hovering near him. It made the world a little less bright. He rolled further onto his side, so he'd be facing towards his dad.

"You know what happened?" Dudley moved his fingers up to Darcy's shoulder, trying to give a supportive gesture. Even through the bedsheet, Darcy could feel the coarseness of his dad's calloused fingers, and, more unusually, the absence of them where his palm should have been.

"Remember, yes. Know…" Darcy forced his fingers apart to squint up at his dad's bandaged hand. Instantly, the medic's words trickled to the forefront of his mind. "What attacked you?"

"Neighbor's dog. Dark wizards. Not that bad."

"That… is a really weird sentence, dad."

"Not the first time. The last one was way worse." Dudley's grip on his shoulder grew slightly tenser, as if telling Darcy without speaking that it would get worse, and likely soon. "Your uncle showed up before anything. Your mom's at a safe house."

"What dark wizards? You mean, that one you hid from?"

Dudley shook his head a bit. "Some other one. He takes them down for a job. Sometimes, some of 'em want to get him first and attack us. Remember visiting Grandma Carol? Disney World?"

"Sort of?"

"Never happened. We hid. He did some spell thing after. He faked the souvenirs, changed the memory."

"Except yours?"

"Yeah."

In a way, Darcy felt almost less disturbed than he should have been by this. He wondered if Atticus knew, but opted not to ask that in favor of a bigger issue. If they had done the magical equivalent of neutralizing him after similar issues before, why did he still remember this one?

If Darcy hadn't been dizzy before, trying to catch up was fixing it. He placed one hand firmly on each side of himself, pushing up on the cot so he could try and lean upright. He needed to see the look on his father's face to know his answers weren't lies.

"In a week, will I remember this conversation?" Darcy asked, his voice dipping lower.

Dudley sounded firm as ever. "You'll need to talk to Harry."

"That's not an answer."

"I don't have one."

"Uncle Harry tell you what happened to me? Drugging? Spells? Who found me?" Darcy tried to imply that he was asking for any information whatsoever that his dad had to give.

It seemed that Dudley didn't catch on, though, as he'd settled on shrugging. "Both."

"Can you tell me?"

"Wait for your uncle," Dudley insisted. The stern tone meant something, but the implications of how Dudley wouldn't answer it was more cryptic to Darcy than a simple explanation—mainly because if the answer was simple, Dudley could've told it.

"You know, no's an answer. I don't like it. But you could go with no."

In a rare moment, Darcy's difficulty managed to make his dad a little happier. There was nothing close to a smile on his features, but there was a little less stiffness in his inflection. Dudley patted his hand where he'd once been holding on, almost but not quite swatting Darcy. "You're yourself, again. Good."

"I'd rather be Stephen Strange," Darcy quipped again, trying to distract them both. It didn't work for long.

Dudley waved a hand, flagging for the attention of the fluorescent green graduates. "Hey! Green people. Can my kid eat yet? He missed dinner by being unconscious." He shouted to the crowd. Darcy flinched at the noise.

"Sir, quiet, please," one of the healers called back, quieter, but still too loud for comfort.

One green robe stepped away from the patient they were tending to and approached Darcy's bedside. They set their eyes on Dudley, addressing him and not Darcy. "Does he have an appetite?"

"Yes," Dudley answered for him.

Darcy raised his head as high as he could muster while leaning back on his arms. "Not much. Gelatin and applesauce?"

Dudley stood his ground, looking only at the healer. "He means yes."

The healer chuckled lightly, as if listening to a colleague at a comedy club's open mic night and being too polite not to indulge the delusion they were funny. "If you have any, it should be fine."

The healer raised her wand towards the doorway, murmured "accio applesauce, accio spoon" and, within a few seconds, the foodstuff and utensil were shooting through the air. She picked up a tray from beside Darcy's bed and pointed the two items down, forcing them to land on the tray. She passed the gravity-bound items towards Darcy with a smile. "Enjoy." She turned slightly, facing both of them. "If you need anything else, there's a bell by the bed. Works a bit better than shouting." She winked, turned on one foot and sprung back away.

Darcy clasped his hand to his mouth and struggled not to snicker at her. Dudley reached down for a bucket and offered it out, prompting with a "here".

Darcy raised his hand and shook that away, gesturing it off. He swayed to grab his spoon, slid lower in his bed and tried to eat in what little peace he could find. He took about three bites from the applesauce cup before crashing back to sleep.

He awoke to such a soft whisper of his name, he assumed that he'd imagined it.

By the time Darcy's eyes cracked open, he could see faint flickers of candlelight passing overhead. The dusty peach divider had been drawn around his bed once, concealing all details of the room but the silhouettes of the presumably green cloaked healers on the hospital floor. The squeaks of footsteps and rolling cots were too soft to distinguish as coming from any specific place. Wherever those people were, they caused just enough noise to further muffle murmurs from a trio of nearby silhouettes.

Darcy raised his head to glance at the curtain, but not around it. As tempted as he was to go pee, and he really, really had to, he was just a smidge more invested in hearing what these people had to say.

"I didn't receive my supervisor's approval for this," a stranger, presumably another healer, stretched her hands out to gesture two figures away.

The second silhouette was also cloaked, moderately tall with an undistinguishable build. The third had a tall bun, was strangely box-shaped, and was carrying an assortment of what seemed to be blocks.

"It's auror business. We've got to be discreet."

"Be that it may, if there's not a life at stake tonight, you can come with visiting hours in the morning."

"Can you think of anything more discreet than being surrounded by dozens of concerned families?" the second silhouette asked back in a way that immediately jogged Darcy's memory. He knew that voice, now. More importantly, he was relatively confident that voice was here to see him.

"The rules are for our patients' well-being. Unless someone else's life is in direct danger, we ask you give them their rest. Please," the healer insisted respectfully.

Darcy closed his eyes most of the way, so he'd pass as having just woken up. He flung an arm across his curtain, pushing it aside. "Can someone take me to the toilet? I can find my bedpan, but it's terrible," he asked, his words hushed enough that he didn't think he'd wake anyone, but plenty loud to be heard.

The candlelight was far too dim for any look Darcy got to be clear, but he could confirm far more detail than the sheet allowed. The cloak did indeed belong to a healer. There was a short, blocky woman carrying a bunch of thin, long boxes. Most importantly, Uncle Harry was here.

"Look. He's awake already. We'll take him for you. Everyone could be happy," Harry suggested. The word 'could' stood out to Darcy in this statement as making it technically true for every person everywhere.

The healer seemed to notice this, too. "Alright, Mr. Potter." She wagged her wand towards the lot of them, sending out one quick flicker of a spark in warning. "Stay in the building. I'm calling security for protocol. They'll be watching you, so, don't you dare try anything funny," she threatened in such a stuffy way, Darcy suspected her idea of a punishment was to force someone into writing a letter of apology.

Harry nodded. "Of course. We're completely humorless," he agreed in word but not inflection.

That, the healer didn't notice. She folded her arms and stepped aside, allowing Harry and the blocky stranger to cross the otherwise quiet hospital floor.

Darcy unclutched his hand from the curtain. He attempted to slide off the bed, only to nearly stumble on the floor. Harry grabbed onto his arm, pulling Darcy back upright. "Lean here. I've got you."

"I'm fine."

"Sure," Harry dismissed, most likely placating Darcy rather than believing him. Considering Darcy also knew he could barely stand, he couldn't take that much offense.

Darcy shifted his weight towards Harry and held on while he staggered his way across the floor. He spotted a glistening metallic sign beneath one of the candles, lighting up the number '3' and the label of 'Potions and Plant Poisoning'.

Darcy waited until they were most of the way towards the elevator for him to hush a question. "Who attacked me and how? Dad said you'd say," he started yawning halfway through and struggled to swallow the signs of it.

"It was a pureblood supremacist and some followers. They tried evaporating a potion called the drought of living death. It puts people to an endless sleep until given the counter-curse. It didn't work," Harry started to explain.

The more Harry explained, the more Darcy paid attention to the words, and stopped watching his increasingly unstable footing. It seemed strange to Darcy that Harry would take the time to explain any of this if he was going to replace the memory a few days later.

Harry gave an extra strong pull on Darcy's arm, yanking him up. Darcy shook his head, snapping as close to attention as he could. "Do you know what a pureblood supremacist is?"

"A quasi-racist against muggles and offspring? Of other muggles, not the band." Rather than wait for another question from Harry, Darcy jumped on throwing his own. "You know who saved me? I'd send flowers."

Harry tugged Darcy to a wobbling stop in front of the elevator doors. He pressed the button. They both paused. "We're not sure, yet. Either someone passed by and left, or, it might be possible that you saved yourself," Harry meant to explain, but the words in that order were even more confusing.

"Did I hallucinate the hyper-realistic tin men? Or did that actually happen?"

"You mean, did the people who attacked you turn to metal?"

It was harder to admit "yes" to that question than Darcy expected. It sounded as normal as it felt insane.

There was a part of him that wished he hadn't seen his uncle nod understandingly. "We found them trapped that way. It was a type of transfiguration. A type of magic. Changing living things into something else."

The elevator dinged open in front of them. Somehow, the act of holding this conversation made Darcy's feet feel even less steady against the seemingly shifting ground. He wobbled his way across, matching Harry's intentionally slow pace to enter the elevator. The silent, blocky woman and her boxes followed along behind.

It wasn't until they were standing still that Darcy dared to try staggering another question. "You think I got them to go metal Medusa on each other, or, something?"

Harry stayed quiet for a moment, seriously considering how best to phrase this without being ambiguous. "You might be a wizard. We're going upstairs to test if you can use a wand. If any of them react, we'll know."

Another day, at a less disorienting time, that might've been the best news Darcy ever heard. Between the rocking sensation of the elevator and the general sense of malaise that kept him clinging to Harry as might as cowardly child, he was left with less enthusiasm and more crushing confusion. The best he could manage to process it all was to stare blankly at the buttons and admit his other, lingering thought. "I really need to pee."

If Darcy hadn't been so locked in his befuddlement, he might've noticed the double-take this reaction got from Harry. "…We'll stop on the way."

As promised, they did stop at the bathroom. While Harry made sure that Darcy didn't pass out in any stalls, the box-holding woman arranged things on the fifth floor.

By the time Darcy stumbled his way out from the bathroom, the souvenir shop had been illuminated as best as candles could allow. The staggered flickering of dozens of flames unified into an unwavering beam along each wall. Rows upon rows of various goodies lined the faintly sweet scented shelves of what should've been a store abandoned to the night. The cashier's chair had been dragged to the center of the room. A stack of at least twenty thin, slate blue boxes wrapped in brown ribbons rest by its arm.

At first, Darcy stalled in the doorway, taken aback by the glow. He pressed his palms over his eyes and squinted, struggling to adjust. Harry, who was still standing over Darcy, guided him forward, crossing the room towards that chair. They came to a stop just a few steps from the former box-holder.

"Darcy, this is Brooke. She's a wand keeper. She'll tell you how to handle them. If anything goes wrong, I'm here to stop it," Harry tried to explain.

Darcy extended his free hand towards the newly-identified Brooke. "Hi, Brooke, I'm Darcy. I was drugged involuntarily," he stated proudly, slightly as a joke, but mostly to justify how terrible he must've looked.

Regardless of the reason, Brooke shook her head. "I heard. Congratulations. Now sit." She slapped both her hands on the back of the lone chair. The smacking sound alone forced Darcy's attention to it.

Harry loosened his grip on Darcy, lowering him down towards the chair. Darcy flopped limply across it. It took two quick blinks and accompanying shakes of the head for Darcy to remotely resemble being aware of where he was.

Now that he was seated, Darcy was at roughly the right height to look the wandkeeper straight at eye level. He had just managed to notice this when Brooke pulled the ends of one ribbon with her teeth.

"Potter give little time to be selective. I rush to describe incident to vands. These say late bloomer might be interesting, perhaps," Brooke spoke through a heavy accent of no particular eastern European country, and yet a little bit like most of them at once. The closest he could come to placing it was the Maximoff twins in Age of Ultron, which was automatically wrong. "You may not know this, boy, but, vizards do not pick vands. A vand picks them."

"Like pet cats?" Darcy meant to joke. She ignored it.

Regardless of her accent's place of origin, Brooke raised the lid from the box, revealing a thin, tan wand with visible wood grain and a thick handle nestled in velvet. "Is fir, thirteen and three quarters, unicorn hair. Clings to survivors of impossible things." Brooke pinched the wand between two fingers with the ribbon around them both, preventing her from physically brushing the wood.

Brooke cupped her remaining hand around Darcy's, pulling it closer to her, and rolled the handle into his grasp. Even in his drowsiness, the proximity sent a quick shudder through his shoulders. He grit his teeth and tried to concentrate on his hands.

"Grasp against palm. All fingers graze. Hold steady, and no choking. As vith person, few enjoy choking," she almost admonished.

As instructed, Darcy let his fingers wrap around the handle. He loosely jostled the wand from Brooke's grip, pulling it towards himself with the handle pointing inwards.

Brooke paused at the sight of him, furrowing her lips and eyebrows. She shook her head, turned at least thirty degrees away from him, and pointed towards the wall. "Now vave. Say first vord to mind. Content does not matter. If likes you, it tells you."

Darcy raised his hand, still loosely grasping the wand. He pointed along the wall and waved his hand carefully through the shape of a 'u' while speaking. "By the eye of Agamoto." His arm stayed extended and his eyes attentive while he stared at the nothingness ahead.

"No, no. Faster. Vith meaning! Vands sense passion. There no passion in vet noodle arms!"

The analogy brought a wrinkle through Darcy's nose. "Agamoto!" Darcy thrust his hand across himself, slashing the wand as he might a dagger through the air.

The only thing to move was Brooke marching back towards him. She wrapped the ribbon around her hand, snatched the wand back and tucked it safely in its box.

"Perhaps fir too firm," she spoke towards the box, so intensely concentrated on it that one might be forgiven for expecting the wand to reply.

Brooke set the box behind the chair before returning her eyes to the stack of boxes. She searched through the labels, leaving Darcy to curl his neck at an awkward angle to watch her rummaging, and Harry to keep holding his own wand at the ready in case something happened. Brooke emerged with a new, slightly shorter box in hand, the ribbon already removed.

"Valnut, ten and a quarter, unicorn hair, agreeable, likes vit and cleverness," she offered a thicker, cocoa-brown wand from its box.

Again, Darcy took the wand into his grasp. He fumbled to grab it for a second, partly from drowsiness and primarily due to staring less at the wand than at his uncle's cautious focus. Harry stared straight back.

Darcy shook his head to pretend that hadn't happened. He closed his eyes and tried to think of what little he knew about principles of magic. Perhaps he needed a specific intention.

Darcy concentrated across the way, focusing up to a candle overhead. He raised the wand with a swooping swoosh. Every ounce of concentration in his body honed on one mental image—to take the tiny flame flickering on one single candle and blow it out. "Extinguish!"

To say that nothing happened was dishonest. Someone did move. Brooke stepped right back to Darcy's chair and plucked the wand from his hand.

"Not so," Brooke stated, far more focused on the wand than on him. She lightly tapped the wand back into its case, opened a new box and started again. A slightly crooked, smooth wand with an almost butter-yellow tip and flecks of bark on its handle rest inside. She pushed it towards him, not even bothering to remove it for him this time. "Villow, twelve even, phoenix feather, springy. A healer's wand, fond of untapped potential." Even she didn't sound like she thought this would work, anymore.

Sensing the lack of enthusiasm, Darcy checked back to Harry. His uncle was still watching just as intently, giving the distinct impression he anticipated something more than flailing gibberish.

Darcy took the box from Brooke's grasp. He reached for a shelf beside him and leaned against it, pushing himself to stand. His fingers squeezed through the cushioned wrappings to force the wand free, then pointed it back at the candle with determination. He kept his eyes closed, picturing the flame going out and the wind washing over it. "Alakazam!"

The room was quiet. Darcy opened his eyes. The light still shone ahead, completely unchanged.

Darcy reached back for the last box, put the wand away, and allowed himself to slump over the shelf of gift-shop approved treats and knick-knacks. The row of snow globes and fake dancing flowers wobbled under him. For hardly spending thirty seconds upright, he felt ridiculously sore.

Again, Brooke approached, taking the box from him. Again, she set the rejected wand aside, reached into the stack beside the chair and half-waved a new wooden stick at him. Her entire body was sinking with a bitter dissatisfaction he might've related to more if he weren't suddenly so desperate to sleep.

"Twelve and a half, ebony, dragon heartstring, unyielding and combative. Dark vood for dark name," Brooke offered.

At first, Darcy was so distracted he missed sight of the slightly curled pitch-black wand being waved in front of him. Only the handle shown any signs of a wood grain, where it formed a twisted circle that faintly reminded Darcy of a raindrop.

Darcy's finger grazed above Brooke's, reaching through her grip to hold the wand. His right hand had barely made contact with the handle before his left shoulder fell into the shelf beside him.

It was a testament to how much he shouldn't have been awake that Darcy's first reaction to falling wasn't to catch himself. It wasn't even to notice how what a single second ago had been a hard, wooden shelf had suddenly turned into an especially tall pillow. He'd simply let himself fall, oblivious to anything but the people nearby.

It wasn't until the third second that Darcy registered the wand was glowing green.

"Augck—" Darcy released the handle and snapped his hand back. He wobbled along the halfway-shifted shelf, which, upon closer inspection, now bore a much closer resemblance to a plush toy replica of a store shelf than the wooden case it had been.

"Pick the vand!" Brooke demanded. Her inflection lost a little of its impact when Darcy's head was squished against a wood-printed pillow.

Darcy set a hand against his plush shelf. He'd had every intent of pushing himself away, yet his hand sank so far into feathers, he only slumped further in.

The ebony wand hovered up from the floor, then up more, until it brushed at Darcy's fingertips. Darcy presumed it was Harry's spell, since he could almost see Brooke, and from the little he was cognizant of, she had no wand and hadn't spoken.

Darcy rocked his weight further onto his right foot, balancing just enough that he could loosely grab the wand. A shaking spread through his arm, spreading a buzzing hum through him that, while not conductive to taking a nap, was strangely comforting in its own right. The glow grew paler, the emerald green dimming to that he'd most often seen on glow in the dark stickers. No wisecrack could do this justice, not that he had the awareness left to try. In this one instant, Darcy was filled with an inviolable sense of drowsy, drug-induced harmony.

He raised his wand towards the ceiling, taking aim at the annoyingly persistent candle one more time. The words of evocation braced to strike.

As he meant to speak, Darcy caught sight of the familial blur. Uncle Harry was still watching with his own wand firmly in hand. That formerly expectant look had disappeared. Instead, he was pretty obviously staring at the mangled atrocity of the lopsided hybrid of a half-wooden, half couch cushion shelf, and all the befuddlement it so rightfully inspired.

Harry didn't use a word to answer Brooke. Instead, he addressed Darcy. "Darcy. You can put the wand down."

Hopeful that permission implied sleeping soon, Darcy was quick to let his arm fall, waving the wand down along with his flickering eyelids.

"Perhaps not quick," Brooke added, a bit too slowly, if the immediate sizzling of boiling water against glass was an indication.

With one uncoordinated wave, a row of snow globes started boiling inside their glass spheres. The sound hardly reached Darcy's ears before the spheres started shattering, shooting flecks of glass across the room.

Harry shot his wand out along with a shielding spell, blocking most of the spray from the group. Thousands of shards clattered against the field and trickled to the floor. The few which didn't crash, most of them close to Darcy, had instead begun to float upwards in the form of tiny, opalescent bubbles.

Brooke cackled with a giddy laugh that, if slightly less chipper, would've made an outlet mall Halloween store proud.

As Darcy watched the bubbles float up, the truth finally drifted down into his admittedly disoriented consciousness. No matter what logic should have implied, no matter what he thought he'd known of himself, no one else had cast that spell.

Longer than he had the right to, Darcy kept staring. He meant to wait for the bubbles to vanish, so he could pretend not to notice the hallucination they very well might have been. No matter how long he looked, they remained, hovering firmly overhead.

He assumed he'd been staring for long enough that someone was close enough to hear him ask a question he'd long since given up on. "Am I leaving for the hog pen?"

"Hogvarts," Brooke corrected automatically.

"I don't know. Maybe." Harry tucked his own wand away, allowing him a firmer grip on Darcy. He pulled Darcy's wand-wielding arm over his shoulder very slowly, being careful not to poke himself or accidentally swish Darcy's wand while taking it from his grasp. "I'll talk to your dad tonight, and the headmistress tomorrow. Do you want to talk to him with me, or go back to sleep?"

Given the lethargic, lifeless flop of Darcy's head and limbs when he tried to stagger forward, he thought it pointless to reply. His eyes set shut, blocking out the hovering bubbles, broken glass and Picasso's favorite shelving unit in favor of quiet.

Harry's second statement proved the assumption right. "Sleep it is."

As difficult as it was to make himself budge when all he wanted was his own bed, the moment Darcy hit his temporary mattress, a new idea snaked into his mind. No matter how long he kept his eyes closed, or what dreams he imagined himself having, Darcy was haunted by something he feared no one would say, yet had started to feel true. Uncle Harry hadn't only stuck around just because Darcy was family. Maybe Harry had come because magical police needed to discern self-defense from assault and, possibly, murder. Those three assailants turned to statues might have died. After all, metal couldn't breathe.

That the thought stuck in his mind so long exemplified Darcy's biggest problem of the day. As was often so, his logic fell in the way of magic.


	6. Acceptance

Before he'd so much as registered that he was awake, Darcy knew one thing. His mother had arrived.

"Whatever you think's happening, it's all a mistake!" Colleen somehow managed to combine yelling, gasping, sobbing and hushing her voice all at once.

It hadn't taken much longer for his father to answer. "Yeah, it was. That we didn't know before."

Colleen huffed. Darcy could visualize in his mind how Colleen must've been leering, her left nostril inflaming as if someone had poured jalapeno juice inside of it. She'd swat a hand through the air, forcing Dudley back so she could keep flailing her points. "No. Before was fine! Now, now with all this, war of warlocks crap, with magical assassins. You really expect me to let him get dragged in?"

Darcy could also imagine the blankly steadfast if puzzled look on Dudley's face while he tried to follow Colleen's thoughts, and eventually settled on a shrug. "Yeah."

Colleen probably flung a wagging finger at Dudley next. "Oh, really? You mean that?"

"If I didn't, I wouldn't say yeah."

"Honest to goodness, swear on your grave, you expected me to just ship off my kid like it's nothing?" Colleen snapped

Dudley had the receptiveness of a brick wall, barely raising his frustration beyond a few stern, baffled words. "To _boarding school_."

It occurred to Darcy, momentarily, that he could stop his parents by sitting up. If they knew he was conscious, odds were good they'd turn their focus to him. That being the case, Darcy made the conscious decision not to move at all. His eyes stayed shut. His hands settled still. Not even his foot would rumple under the blanket. Whatever they had to say, his instincts said it'd tell him more than his parents willingly would.

"Run by people we never even met, doing lord knows what. These people tried to kill us, Dudley, and you're just gonna toss him in with madmen, freaks and lunatics!"

"We sent Atticus," Dudley could barely start saying Atticus' name before Colleen's words overtook his, slightly louder and twelve times more adamant.

"Atticus wasn't a choice! He's sick. He's always been sick, and we saw it happen! But this. How do you know this statue incident even happened?" Her hand—or at least something of a similar texture—hit against something—presumably Dudley—with a fleshy smack.

If she had hit him, Dudley's sole retaliation was with words. "'Cause Harry told us!"

Something flapped, fwacked and pounded. Were it not for the context, Darcy might've thought it a sail in a tsunami hitting sailors in the face. The sound looped so perfectly, it may have been pre-recorded.

"No! No us! You. He told you, like we wouldn't have noticed. Over fifteen years! Did they record it, maybe, take a moving picture? No! They didn't even make up fake evidence!"

"Of course not. It happened."

The cloth flapped harder, crumpling in what was likely Colleens' clutch. "If it did, it's a crime. You know. Those things that need to be proven to happen before they do something? Even these people don't laugh off attempted murder, do they? If they do, I'm sure there're some delightful gang members who'd like to join!"

For a moment, it seemed their verbal pong could go on forever.

"He's not lying."

"How the hell would you know? Can you pull your brain from your stomach for three seconds and think?"

"Yeah. If you were right, which you're not, why the hell would he want Darcy?"

"Maybe since you're dumb enough to hand him over!" Colleen's breath staggered, catching on rocks in her throat. "He's not like Atticus, Dudley. He won't handle it. People, they're not built for magic. It's unnatural. It's, a latent god complex in a stick. Men shouldn't make the world bow. Those that can, once they know they can, most of them don't think they're men anymore. Atticus, I knew what to teach him so that wouldn't happen. But Darcy?"

Darcy could think of a thousand ends to that sentence his mother meant to imply. " _But Darcy's an entitled little shit stain. But Darcy's ego could fly around the world in eighty days, then rise into orbit as a second moon. But Darcy's so judgmental and vindictive, give him power and he's a future serial killer. We can't trust him."_ As much as Darcy knew he should want to argue against the imagined intent, the fact that he was implicitly lying by feigning sleep this whole time didn't exactly help.

"If Harry says Darcy has magic, he does. We don't choose."

"Then we treat it here. Here. It can be like having asthma. There must be some kind of incantation that negates other magic. Why don't you ask the great cousin Harry?" Colleen raised her pitch, mockingly sarcastic. She might've wigged her fingers to indicate magic. That sounded like something she would do.

"We're sending him to Hogwarts."

One piece of flesh smacked against another, practically a clap. "You don't get to use we! There's no we here, not except me and Darcy, and considering the last time you watched him, he got here," Colleen spat her words, barely conscientious enough of her volume to avoid a full-out yell.

Not to be outdone, Dudley spoke louder still. "He's going to Hogwarts!"

"The real we's going home, to my place. You, you're staying here. I'm signing him out!"

She meant it from a good place. Darcy tried to tell himself that. Still, as he lay by, he wasn't only hearing what his mother was saying. There were other words that followed, ones he thought she must have meant, but didn't have time to add. _"Don't you understand? We can't trust Darcy how we trust Atticus!"_

"I won't let you!" Dudley shouted back.

It was clear neither of them were mindful of being in a hospital, anymore. Colleen stopped bothering with hushing herself, too, just in case being the louder one meant getting her way. "For some reason, you're mad enough to think you've got a choice!"

"You're too sure you're right to see we don't!"

Colleen had to have heard, but chose not to listen. Metal rings clanked along another swoosh of fabric as she parted the privacy curtain as violently as one could shove away fabric. "Goodbye, Dudley!"

It would've been easier to let his mother leave. Darcy could talk to Dudley alone, when she was trying to release him from the hospital. Better yet, he could keep pretending to sleep forever. They were both right. There were no perfect options. What good would anything he had to say really do, here?

In spite of that, the facts loomed. Whether or not Darcy had control, he had magic. Without control, he'd caused multiple explosions and made a far more literal iron man than the world ever required.

With far more breathlessness than laying down should have caused, Darcy rose from his false sleep. His hands clutched his sweat-dampened sheets, grasping for the slightest bit of stability. He forced his half-open eyes straight ahead, at the back of his privacy curtains and his mother's heeled silhouette.

"Mum," Darcy's voice crumpled under him.

Colleen stopped in her tracks, her head flipping back to Darcy. Dudley's did, too, or Darcy assumed it must have, given that they were both silent.

"Darcy," Colleen's bottom lip drifted open slightly. Her hand raised towards her mouth, bracing to say something more substantial.

The words fell from his mouth first, cracking on impact. "I killed three people."

Darcy saw his mom lunging towards him, but he'd hardly had the time to react before she'd sprinted back to him. Her French-manicured fingers tapped the top of his shoulder, grasping tepidly for his attention. "Oh, no, no, Darcy, no. You didn't do a thing. Those monsters are more alive than they deserve to be," she tried to assure him.

Darcy paused, both to try and pull his concentration from his mother's hand, and also to register how that was possible.

"But I would've. Logically," the functions of a human body couldn't exactly be maintained if one was turned to metal, particularly breathing. Even if they had been turned back to their original, organic composition, they had stopped having a pulse for so long, the damage must have been severe. The fundamental flaw in that line of logic wouldn't occur to Darcy until it was explicitly pointed out to him.

"Don't say that. Don't even think about it. It was an accident."

"Before. It'll happen again."

"No, no, it won't. You'll be safe, we'll hide for just a little while. This isn't our problem, it's simply, one we're adjacent to for a little while. It'll pass," her fingers passed across his scalp as might a massager with dying batteries, without energy or conviction to make it more than an uncomfortable graze.

Dudley's voice cut over from the side of the room. A clear tint of annoyance snuck through. "Colleen, shut up. He's going."

Colleen lifted her hand from Darcy's head to swat it through the air, again. Her nostril flared, too. "Jesus Christ, Dudley, can't you see he's distraught? Wait, of course not, you don't even know what that word means."

Darcy could sense the argument coming, just as much as he knew it wasn't the real issue at hand. For once, the stereotypical 'it's not your fault we're fighting' was the exact opposite of true. This wouldn't stop until he picked a side. He had to speak.

"You're not delusional enough to trust me. That's fine. I'm not like Atticus. I'm not _good—"_

Colleen's arms wrapped around Darcy so forcefully, her hug felt like a slap. He flinched, starting to recoil, but her snaking grip entrapped him so securely, Darcy had no room to budge. Her fingernails trailed his neck, pressing at hair that had barely started growing. "No, baby. No, no, that's not." He imagined each rough edge as a spider's leg, poking along his pores.

"I heard. Earlier. The, insinuation of my instant God complex," Darcy somehow managed to state.

Colleen's tone stayed just as hushed, forcing a veneer of compassion over her frustrations."That's not what I meant."

Dudley hardly moved from the side of the room. He hadn't needed to. His words reached between them, the same level and tone as they'd been at when the conversation started. "What do you mean, good?"

Colleen sighed. She started to whisper an "ig—" which was in all likelihood intended to finish as _"Ignore him"_ , but wasn't given the chance to before Darcy interjected.

"Of positive societal impact."

Colleen sighed harder. Her grip loosened just enough for Darcy to manage a decent breath, but not so much that her exhale didn't ruffle his fringe along his forehead. She shifted an arm enough that she could brush the hair aside as she spoke. "Darcy, this isn't about good. Which you are, when you remember to try."

"And you're biologically predisposed to believe," he dismissed.

If she hadn't used up her sigh quota already, Darcy was sure she would've used another one, there. Instead, she coiled her head around, angling so that she could stare straight at him.

"This isn't about morals, it's who you are, what you love. Atticus, he's always kept his heart above his head, off without reason, with magic. Sure, you don't listen, but, you've always known what you wanted, here. Reasoning, rationalizing, chasing technology, to be the smartest person in the room. When you were nine, you told me you wanted to be a coroner, for Christ's sakes." Her hand stroked at his shoulder as she might've pet a cat through a blanket. Her voice followed the pattern, waning as her hand retracted. "A world without science, or all your coding and cracking, centuries removed from anything we have here… You're going to lose yourself. Do you want that? Really?"

It should've been an easy answer. Darcy didn't give one. Instead, he slouched in his mother's grasp, trying not to feel the pressure of her hands.

Darcy's head snapped upright at his father's voice, sending a blunt assertion across the air. "Changing isn't losing. Dying is. Don't die."

The point hit Darcy straight on, so obviously right, it might as well have smacked him.

Barely two seconds of awkward dwelling later, a stranger's voice called through the squirming silence, abrupt and choppy, with a mid-afternoon radio show host's enthusiasm. "Hey. I, hate to cut off totally unfollowable advice, but, are you the Dursleys? Also, did someone tell you this was a hospital? Because people not dying in here is, while the intended point, not really all that common, by the by."

Darcy started shifting to look, but the combined presence of his mother's arms and the privacy curtain kept the stranger obscured. He could barely see his dad move to stand defensively between the guy and the cloth. "What do you want?"

A hand so pale its skin looked almost like paper tried to stretch past Dudley, towards a packet of papers posted on the footboard. "Ah. The chart. There's a chart. Sorry. I'm Professor Carrow?"

The hand reached further still, grazing towards the papers. Dudley shifted to tower directly in their way, even more firmly and defensively than before.

The figure of the obscured Professor Carrow tilted even further from view more behind the looming Dudley. They spoke with enough strain to be squinting every organ in their body, eyes included. "I'm-was asked to bring a Darcy Dursley a letter to Hogwarts? Also, to the castle, as an escort, in the, more proper sense of it. Students and parents outside of our alumni base always get professor visits. Like most pointless things, it's tradition."

While Colleen had busied herself staring suspiciously at their intruder, Darcy slipped from her hug. He leaned further back in the bed, adopting a resting position because it was the only one he'd stand a chance of seeing the figure from.

As Darcy could've already inferred, this Carrow was much smaller than Dudley in every direction. His eyebrows were twice as long as his eyes, one of which seemed to be tilted at least ten degrees off from the other. His moderately firm jawline set an otherwise round face with slicked-back dark hair into a slightly confusing mix of pointed curves, and his jet black eyes ran wildly about the rest of him. Were it not for his tannish blue suit, he might as well have existed in monochrome.

With a considerable amount of craning his neck, the professor looked around Dudley's barricade, straight towards Darcy. On contact, the black eyes seemed less piercing than they were jumpy. "I assume you're Darcy?"

Unsure of what to do, Darcy settled for his instinct. He pointed back at his dad. "Incorrectly, then. He's Darcy."

Dudley stepped right back in the way with a flat "he's lying."

If the urge to roll one's eyes could make a sound, it snuck through Colleen's glare. "Dudley, stop it."

Tempted as Darcy was to ask why she, of all people, was the one who didn't take issue with this, Darcy couldn't find the time.

"Oh. Well." Carrow laughed like gift bag tissue paper, crinkling and strangely disruptive for such a soft sound. He tried to lean his entire body around Dudley. He smiled broadly—a salesman's smile, or perhaps a children's show host's. It was instantly unsettling. "You, ah, wouldn't by chance need an aging curse lifted, would you?"

"Only on my decrepit soul," Darcy quipped.

Whether by will or ignorance, Carrow stayed oblivious to the sarcasm. He reached for the sealed envelope tucked under his arm. "Wonderful. I'm terrible at those. Here's your official tentative Hogwarts acceptance letter." He promptly chucked the letter at Darcy's bed, hitting Colleen straight in the arm. He winced and uttered a "sorry" the second it happened. She glared back.

Darcy turned the envelope over. The parchment was thicker than any he'd felt before, and the scripted but not cursive emerald lettering on the front spelled both his name and current address as "St Mungo's Hospital, Third Floor, Bed Nine", this being the only way Darcy learned he evidently had a bed number.

"Acceptance tentative, or tentative that I'd accept?" Darcy murmured towards the letter. Carrow had a liar's face down flat, so it seemed pointless to keep watching him while both his parents had that covered. He occupied himself dislodging the seal while he listened along.

"Both. There's normally a year listed. But, normally you're short and've never heard of Algebra, so, you and staff with way more seniority than me can negotiate the details with Headmistress McGonagall. I'm just human-shaped transit. But not a bicycle. Definitely not a bicycle," Carrow stammered to explain.

It wasn't the first time Darcy had seen this letterhead, so there seemed little point in gawking. He could still remember when it was Atticus' name on the envelope, and the entire family had been gathered by Professor Longbottom, who'd seemed far less like a horror villain than the one they'd forced into explaining the school, this time. Darcy could still remember how Grandma Petunia had pulled him aside when everything else was done, how she'd made him promise at least three times that he would never hold what Atticus could do against him. She'd never quite explained why, only that it was important.

He wondered for a fraction of a second if his grandma was being held with his parents for safety as well, and then for another how she would react to hearing this. Any other seconds were cut off by the sound of his mother's sharpened question. "Did Harry send you?"

"Which Harry?"

If Darcy he wasn't so occupied reading, he would've answered 'Dresden'. Instead, he started skimming the letter for more details. The Hogwarts Express instructions had all been omitted, as had any mentions of a specific curriculum. In the place of referencing spell books, it instead stated those would be determined based upon reasonable need.

A spurt of a crinkly "a-ha" puffed out of Carrow. He snapped his fingers in front of himself and raced into a babble. "I can, sadly realistically believe I just got this. You're those Dursleys! Atticus' parents. Right?" He extended one hand towards each of the Dursley parents' shoulders, reaching to pat them. Colleen backed off before he could, leaving Carrow to pat Dudley with his cartoonish enthusiasm. "I'm dangerously close to heading straight to suck up with this, but, I actually mean, he is genuinely great to have in class. He asks tons of questions, and he's never thrown his rats at the other kids or anything."

Given the distaste puffing through her nose and chest, for the first time that day, Darcy could see himself whole-heartedly agreeing with his mother. "Does that happen often?" she asked.

"There're other Dursleys?" Dudley asked, less convinced.

Carrow's head bobbed to one side, as if pushed by an invisible breeze. His loose hand tucked under his chin, its knuckles tapping near his lips in the most stereotypical pondering pose possible. "I'd assume, somewhere. There're others with most names. It's even worse when you start including dogs, or towns. Most last names have towns..."

"Except maybe Hitler," Darcy countered, unenthused.

Finally sensing some of the hostility, Carrow lifted both of his hands upwards and clapped them together, snapping his thoughts in place. "Anyway, uh. The script suggests I display and rationalize magic, which, seems just as counter-intuitive as it is completely unnecessary, so, uh, do you have any questions?"

Colleen barely wasted a second before leaning straight in, her neck seemingly stretching so she could loom over from meters away. "Has the staff started discussing his curriculum? How will he get his textbooks? I don't want him losing four years of education."

"I don't know? We've got spare stuff on campus. He can borrow some until we get a Hogsmeade weekend. Oh, speaking of which, you'll need to sign this form here for him to be admitted off school grounds during the year. We can summon rain in a desert but, lawyers are forever." Another crinkly laugh masked what Darcy presumed might have, this time, genuinely been a piece of paper moving. He'd gone back to looking at the letter, so he couldn't quite tell.

Before anyone else could try to, Darcy spoke up, his tone pointed as his suspicions. "Who sent you to find us?"

"Oh, well," Carrow stuttered. It sounded suspicious, but, based on his demeanor, might just as easily be a habit. "That was, the headmistress. She would've come in person, but, our divination teacher was convinced a second year would fall through the stars, stairs, or the other stares. She sends apologies and me, I suppose, or infer. She didn't say, exactly."

"How do we know you're not impersonating a professor to kidnap me?"

"Because, I had the letter?"

"At one point possessed in similar format by every magic-user in the country."

Carrow's voice dipped meeker, quieter. "I could find a friend, or acquaintance."

"Who we'd also have no reason to trust."

Carrow smiled nervously, flashing most of his top teeth in the process. His hands twisted around each other. He was so obviously unnerved that all three Dursleys were on guard, now. "Maybe, did your brother ever tell you about counter-spells?"

"RPGs did."

Carrow shrugged so drastically, his shoulders nearly reached his ears. "Good enough." He pivoted and stepped in unison, past the curtain, away to the grounds of the third floor.

His voice traveled through the curtain, distorted only in the direction it was thrown in. Darcy thought he caught a peek of Carrow's hand stretching into the air, beckoning attention from, presumably, some kind of person. "Hey! Frida! So good to see you alive. If we're not all hallucinating, I'm alive, too. Would you mind stopping and sparing maybe eighty or a hundred seconds or so to explain how a counter-spell could undo a human's transfigured disguise?" he asked.

A healer stopped in her tracks, her words both bemused and exasperated."Icarus! Dear, Merlin, come to haunt me with eternal pop quizzes? Darn you."

"C'mon, it's for a student. I've got dinosaur stickers with realistic roars. Pretty please."

"Oh, fine."

The curtains drew apart, revealing one of the many healers in the floor. Frida's face seemed just familiar enough for Darcy to believe she'd been there the whole time, a genuine bystander—not that he'd ever be fully convinced after what he'd seen the night before. The healer looked straight towards Darcy, assuming, rightfully, based on the context that the answer was meant for him.

"It'd depend on the magic. If it's a polyjuice potion, then, the transformation back is done by time, but, the person's voice stays the same, so, finite might un-do any charms used to change that. If they used transfiguration, then, an incanted reversal would do it. What were the words? Reversare?"

Frida turned her neck back to Carrow, checking for a nod. Instead, he gave a semi-forced smile. "Right! Can you perform both on me? I need to prove I'm not a shape shifting crazy spy person."

"Are you sure?"

"That I don't have other ideas, totally completely," he nodded.

Frida drew a wand from the pocket of her robes. She aimed and swished both spells in quick succession. "Finite! Reversare deformo!"

The angle at which Darcy was sitting didn't give him the best view. Still, he could spot flickers of light sparking from the tip of Frida's wand and smacking across Professor Carrow. Both sets of shimmers burst across him. The first removed the slick from his hair, scattering the strands to flatten across his eyes and forehead. He brushed the fringe aside with the tip of his own wand, revealing basically no changes at all, not even to that uneasy grin. "Ta dah! Static me."

"Was there anything else you needed?" Frida asked, leaning further into the room without raising her feet.

Carrow flicked his wand-wielding hand dismissively. "I could use some grape toast, but, I'll get it. Thanks. That really helped way more than it looked like, in its not doing anything."

"Bye, professor. Enjoy today."

"As much as every other day. Except maybe the one for arbor."

Frida pocketed her wand. She waved shallowly back on her way out of the door, her posture relaxing with each step, as if to silently remark on how weird that was.

Carrow pivoted on his back right foot, turning so he could face all three Durlseys with a twinge more of false confidence. "There. Does that prove it?"

Darcy stared straight on, underwhelmed. "No."

Carrow's stagnant smile cracked ever so slightly. "Well. I'll need you to come anyway, at this point, if it's alright with your parents? The headmistress' not got much time. Schedule-wise, not, life-span, that was terrible phrasing," he checked from Colleen, then to Dudley. Neither seemed satisfied, but, they hadn't moved to strangle Carrow, which was something. "I'm so sorry for the rushing. We'll figure out a lesson plan first thing. Or, among our first seven things. You can have it mailed to you for final approval, if that helps?" Carrow pivoted again, this time to face Colleen, specifically.

Her formerly-unflappably-judgmental glower gave a bit of way. "It would."

"Send it to Harry. We're hiding," Dudley interjected.

"At the moment, more poorly than I'd prefer," Colleen didn't give him the courtesy of looking towards the interruption. She lifted her chin a bit, her pearls shifting along her collarbones, still scrounging for fragments of dignity. "You're sure there's no way we can go? Help him along?"

Carrow's wobbling smile finally seemed appropriate. The hesitance here looked less like self-doubt than it did concern. "We would, but, really, you'll help most of us most by being safe. Okay? Yeah."

Darcy meant to sit upright. He barely moved his hand before the sound of heels clicking across the hardwood called his attention away. His mother's arms wrapped around him, again replicating her snakelike grip.

Colleen's words blurred together, a mass of concern and rushed ideas, as if she'd had to cast them all out at once, or they'd burn away forever. "Take care of yourself. Listen to your teachers. Write to us. Stick close to Atticus if you start getting confused. I'll miss you so much. Be back for Christmas. I love you."

The words were so packed together, he could barely make out a segment from his dad, in near unison with his mother's last point. "We love you."

Darcy didn't have it in him to say the words. The gesture of speaking obvious truths seemed so pointless. He gave a shallow half-nod, a compromise with himself, instead

The paper-pale hands of Professor Carrow settled by Darcy's wrist, pulling him upwards. Darcy struggled not to shudder.

"Can you let go? Thanks," Carrow asked Colleen. She shot him a disapproving look at first, allowed it to fade, and then obliged, backing away. Somehow, she found the will in herself to stand beside Dudley without disemboweling him on the spot.

The icy fingers tingled on Darcy's arm, creeping up through his bone. He pushed away from the bed, willing himself to stand. An instant before he found his balance, Carrow set his opposite hand on Darcy's shoulder, positioning him at a literal arm's length.

"Keep still and don't move. We're going to apparate."

Given that the term 'apparate' was far from a word, Darcy's rush to ask what it implied was perfectly reasonable. He hadn't made it past the "What do—" before the hospital vanished from sight.


	7. Barrier

Of the thousands of questions still abuzz in Darcy's mind, at least one of them got a quick answer. The word apparate meant teleport.

The last words of his intended question "—es that mean—" spurted from Darcy's mouth while he was already processing the explanation. Mercifully to the circumstance, Carrow was too occupied to notice. In the fraction of a second it had taken for both of their bodies to solidify on the grassy forest grounds, Carrow had taken to tapping his wand into what, at first glance, appeared to be thin air.

"Headmistress! Headmistress! Lover of faces and assorted appendages," Carrow skimmed the tip of his wand along an invisible curve. Under the pressure, the space behind it started to ripple, transparent yet distorted.

A castle stood in the distance, radiating the orange light of burning flames from each window. Its spire and peaks stood tall, the one unnatural object in the wilderness, casting its majesty over everything else. It was far too distant to touch, yet, it beckoned every being towards it, the light lording over its domain just beyond the barrier's reach.

Darcy pointed his own wand against the rippling surface. A literal spark sprouted up, angrily yellow, and skipped upwards along the barrier. He poked it again a few steps down, ignoring whatever the teacher was saying in favor of testing the force field. He could picture this invisible net stretching around the school. If the curve was any indication, the barrier was round and all-encompassing, sizable enough so that the arch of the sphere wasn't immediately apparent until he'd been looking for it.

He'd barely pulled himself from the analysis long enough to hear Carrow half-mutter, half-exclaim "oh gormy," which was neither a spell in Latin nor a word in general. He raised his wand over his head and shot out a series of three, smoking flares. Each popped loud enough to make Darcy's feet bounce up involuntarily.

Carrow's head jostled up with the sound, his attention springing from sparks to Darcy's face. The awe of watching a firework still settled in his sunken, near-black eyes, the enthusiasm clashing with his features. "How are you?" he chirped.

It threw Darcy's eyes to blink that he was willing to describe a grown man's voice as chirping. He raised his own hand towards his neck, ruffling the back of his hair in the hope of looking less awkward than he felt. "Conscious."

"I'd hope so, since you're talking and all that. Sleep-talking, like sleep-walking, that's pretty useless for accomplishing stuff, aside from making noise. It does do that," Carrow babbled. His head tilted back, his chin pointing up towards the smoke in the sky.

The intensity of that focus should've drawn Darcy to look in that direction. Instead, he looked only at the teacher, discomfort taking a stranglehold. He hadn't seen a face that entranced since Atticus on Christmas morning. To have that look on a grown man was just wrong.

"Freud might argue otherwise," Darcy mumbled.

Carrow shrugged back. "Sure, yeah."

"You know Freud?" Darcy muttered, his nose shifting to the left.

Carrow's shoulders had never dropped far enough for the shrug to stop. "Well, not really. Whatsoever. It's more, well, in my experience, anyone might do anything. It's a beautiful word, might; ambiguous, superfluous and generally useless."

In spite of himself and his reason, Darcy's attention did start to slip from Carrow alone. The all-consuming darkness of the countryside sky invaded his view. The smoke of the spells had faded out, leaving only the glimmering contrast of far-away fires fighting the abyss of worlds beyond reach, of the probable nothing and possible everything.

It was so beautiful here, it practically forced Darcy to tarnish it somehow.

"I might transform into a giant mechanical lizard monster, that could happen," Darcy countered, a lemony bitterness trailing from him.

Again, Carrow stayed blasé. "Go for it. As long as you're not in class. I wouldn't know where to put that size of desk." Instead of questioning how, exactly, this would come about, or what the benefit would be to such an act in the first place, Carrow settled on slipping his hands into his pockets and leaning further to the sky, his back bending at an angle that couldn't possibly have been comfortable. "Should I know Freud?"

"Not if you want to hold your wand without nightmares," Darcy quipped.

"So, yes, then. I love nightmares."

"You, what?"

Carrow's chuckle crinkled against the stars. "All the thrill of danger, none of the risk. It's training for terrible things."

Perhaps, Darcy considered briefly, he legitimately had been left in the company of a madman.

The force field holding them back was as invisible as the rest of it, so Darcy couldn't exactly see what occurred, but that didn't stop him from feeling the shift. A sudden burst of warmth tickled his eyelashes and through his hospital gown—which it only now occurred to him he had yet to change out of.

A typically childish "yes!" spurted from Carrow. He hardly wasted two seconds before reaching through the now-accessible space. His foot parted the grass, then another, treading closer to the light. He cupped a hand around his mouth and called up to the stars "Thank you, we'll be right up. No lefts at all."

Who, exactly, he believed he could continue to be contacting in this wilderness would be another entry in Darcy's ever-growing collection of unanswered questions. The point fell out of focus as soon as Carrow waved his hand towards himself, either ineffectively fanning himself or, as was far more likely to the context, beckoning Darcy ahead. "Come on, this way. Into the only castle in the whole area."

Darcy raised his wand overhead once more, checking that the barrier was indeed not in range. No sooner did he step to the other side, the grass reaching over his ankle socks to tickle his skin, did he see his wand spark again, the barrier setting into place once more.

He forced his attention from the shooting gold spark, over to check his tour guide. Carrow marched ahead, each stride longer than the last by force of will alone, down the long and winding meadow to the school. Darcy's feet paused, momentarily confused. "We're not teleporting again?"

Carrow didn't stop to speak. Instead, he shook his wand as one might a torch without batteries, prompting it until it had a glow of its own. Carrow cast the beam ahead, illuminating the path in front of them. Only then did he bother to look back. "What'd you mean?"

Darcy struggled to recall the word. He kept thinking teleport, yet, there was some other way they'd said it. "Vanishing. The, appearing—"

Carrow snapped the fingers of his one free hand at the realization. "Oh. Apparating! Yes. No. We aren't. Not on school grounds. Against policy, you see, or, rather, don't see, but, you sort of have to know regardless. Come, come. Might not be bad to have you on your feet, anyway, with the, generally needing to walk to your classes tomorrow and so. You think you can handle it, right?"

As unsteady as his legs felt, if he measured them, Darcy thought he could do it. More influentially, he was much too stubborn to admit he couldn't, so he bobbed his head and continued.

The grounds were silent, and not in the peaceful way. The wind didn't so much as howl but swirl, echo and twirl again. The gust kept whipping the end of his gown. As mercifully abandoned as the area was, so Darcy could avoid making his first impression at school in what was essentially a paper dress, the isolation was just as much a danger. Anything could happen here, and the lone witness would be the kind of man who snapped at his ideas and loved nightmares. Worse yet, the silence let Darcy think.

That was far more a danger lately than he preferred.

The tension stepped in his mind, building to a boil. He wasn't sure how long they'd been walking. The castle seemed far closer than it had before, about halfway so. He'd managed to catch up to the professor, who, it seemed, had also slowed down to allow that to be the case. Darcy's occasional limping wasn't exactly hasty. He'd managed to find enough stability, however, that he allowed himself to speak.

"Professor Carrow," Darcy called.

Carrow turned his head, but not his wand. The angle cast half of his face in indistinguishable shadows, concealed with black. His answer was almost a hum. "Mhm?"

"Do you know the conditions of me being accepted?"

Carrow's steps slowed slightly, again allowing Darcy to catch up. He waited until Darcy was back at his side to answer up.

Only now, when Darcy was this close to Carrow and explicitly trying to pay attention to him, had Darcy realized his eyes were level with Carrow's forehead.

"That you're not a beast pretending to be a wizard, and you don't plan to destroy us all. Other than 'no mass murders', not really, no," Carrow's hands shifted up in his pockets while he shrugged.

"So it's contingent on the survival of the people who attacked me?" Darcy struggled to understand.

"And other things. The other things're more relevant, considering. They're fine, already, those people, I'm sure." Carrow sounded dismissive as ever. His attention remained set ahead, admiring the building and the golden aura of candlelight around it.

"Those people were turned to iron," Darcy stressed the last words, trying to insert all of his implications in there. Sure, his mother had said they survived, Harry had said they survived, but Darcy had read _Ender's Game_ often enough to know that might not be true.

Carrow and his dishonest smile, in their own way, might seemed more trustworthy in their dismissal. "And they got turned back. What magic does, magic undoes. Anything but death."

"But, if their organs stopped working, became inanimate, if the matter reversed to its original chemical composition, even at once, the electric signals for thought, to make organs work, those would've been stopped, at least initially. How do those start up again?"

"Because they're healed with magic?" Carrow questioned his own explanation, likely because he had some difficulty understanding the question.

Darcy hunched and pressed forward, trying to angle himself to a better view of Carrow's face in this darkness. "Was there a healing spell mimicking electricity? Magic defribulators?"

Carrow's eyebrows wrinkled at their slightly different angles. "Maybe. Probably not, given I don't know what it means, but, maybe, given, me not knowing what you mean and all."

Darcy slid back to a standard walk. "Then how does it work?"

"Complicatedly."

"The castle's over two km away. There's time," Darcy guessed, being far more definitive about things he had no way to know.

As tended to be the case, Carrow hadn't bothered to correct him. Whether this was because magical people had no sense of the metric system, or Darcy was correct, he'd not bother asking. He was far more concerned with getting someone to explain to him how in the world he wasn't currently guilty of some variant of manslaughter.

"It's a function of transfiguration, I guess, what's there to start is what's there to end, long as you do it right. Or appropriately wrong. Turning something living to something non-living, it's not a full switch. What makes up the object, it's all still in there. It's merely squished down in the casing the spell put over it."

Carrow paused. He put his hand on Darcy's shoulder, ensuring his attention and, less intentionally, his momentary discomfort. "All those bits and pieces are so blocked out from anything else, to them, it's like, time and change aren't working. They freeze. Then, when the spell stops, that shell unlocks, and the object gets to know, hey, it's a new second, we should do what we were doing before, and it all starts up again, unaware anything passed."

"So, transfiguration initiates suspended animation?"

Carrow seemed doubtful enough that it was entirely possible Darcy hadn't understood a word of it. His left hand dislodged from his pocket to press under his chin. "In at they're all inanimate for now and now only, if that's what that's getting to."

"So someone could find them a decade later, un-do the spell, and the cursed person'd have come out as old as they were when it happened?" Like Han Solo frozen in the carbonite could be unfrozen and he'd also be alive, Darcy supposed, but couldn't articulate as the reference would be lost.

Carrow bobbed back. "In body, yes, that's right. For a person, in spirit, not exactly. They'd have sensed a little something or possibly even everything, but, that's to do with souls and I don't know enough about those to pretend I know about them, so, assume the second half's only half right."

Dismissing how confusing that concept was, there was another question that left unaddressed, one that involved substantially less death, yet was just as perplexing. "Then why's acceptance tentative?"

"Don't know."

"To ensure I'm not a psychopath?"

"Probably not. We've taught many psychopaths. Might be due for some re-evaluation on that, come to mention it, and uncomfortably dwell on it," Carrow silenced his laugh to a light, rustling chuckle at the back of his hand. He let his hand slip towards his neck. "I think it's more, the last record of magic starting after an eleventh birthday was a Belgian nun in 1987."

"Wonderful," Darcy noted sarcastically.

As usual, Carrow missed the sarcasm. He was so good at not noticing, Darcy might have to wonder if he was doing so not from ignorance, but to mess with him.

"Her sisters didn't think so. The whole place called three droves of exorcists. Any clue how many exorcists are in a drove? I don't know, either, I'm guessing maybe six? Do muggle droves involve those motorable vehicles?" he guessed. "I don't speak about droves, much. Here, they're more, an unidentifiable unquantified lump of indeterminate number. I usually think of it as at least five, no more than forty, though that might be more because I never see more than forty people in one place at a time that doesn't involve sports or food. What do you think?"

"You should buy a dictionary for recreational reading," Darcy snarked.

Again, Carrow missed the implication, instead moving straight to surprise. "Muggles have dictionaries?"

Carrow's meandering ideas continued on with his body, both of them weaving across the way. The longer they trailed, the simpler the steps became, and the further Darcy's own ideas started to stray. He realized that, in all this walking, Carrow had neglected to mention exactly what he was a professor of aside from his own terrible ideas.

The eerie calm of the long walk in gave Darcy some time to find both a stride and his bearings. Beneath all the panic, for a fraction of a second, he might've dared to identify a shake or two in his chest as exhilaration.

By the point Carrow started pounding on the drum of Darcy's shoulder, Darcy had to remind himself he was supposed to be unsettled, again.

"Oh, would you look at that? Or not. It's still there if you don't, so, doesn't really matter that much, unless you care about walking into walls," Carrow immediately lost confidence in his own assertion. The light had disappeared from the tip of his wand, the beam no longer necessary when enshrouded in the castle's glow. He pointed at the wooden door, uttered a spell just garbled enough for Darcy not to identify the syllables, and pushed his palm against it, propping the hallway open.

Carrow's coal-tinted, googly eyes rattled up to the ceiling. He addressed the castle not with awe, but as if he was talking straight to a person. He very well might have been, considering. "Headmistress! Headmistress McGonagall! We're here! And about to stop shouting for you, now." Carrow glanced down, checking at the still-stationary Darcy. He nudged his back, pushing him towards the corridor ahead.

As desperately as Darcy wished to stop being amazed, when his eyes drifted off the ground to the portrait-cluttered walls, he was crushed by the knowledge it would take a while. The overwhelming warm tones of the exterior were even more oppressively orange and cozy from the inside. His imagination dashed far ahead of him, reluctantly identifying it as the most comfortable version of a Dungeons and Dragons setting he'd ever hope to encounter, fictional or otherwise.

Darcy had hardly managed a first footstep before someone else tread into view.

"Carrow," a voice tread over a staircase, traveling down to the pair below. A woman stood above them, dressed in a dark green tartan cloak. A stack of books was nestled between her arms, each them thicker than the last. Darcy could see gold lettering along the spines, but, in spite of widening his stare up at her, could not hope to make out the words.

Professor Carrow stomped one foot to an immediate stop at her call. He shifted closer to upright, his stance still wobbling, though not consciously so. "Headmistress. A person at this time of night, how nice."

"I should hope you don't mind leaving Dursley in my care. If you hurry, there may be some food left in the kitchens," she suggested.

The headmistress set one hand away from the books and onto the railing, tracing her future path on the way down. Carrow firmed an uncomfortable grip on Darcy's shoulder, anchoring him in place. His smile broadened back to salesman-mode at his boss. "For sake of breakfast, there'd best be. Biscuit stash in my desk won't feed a school—"

She cleared her throat. "Food from this evening."

He managed an "hm," with no clear indication of positivity or otherwise.

Darcy tried to catch a closer glimpse of his surroundings. The staircase started to shift while the headmistress was mid-step, pivoting from one starting point to the next. She continued without a second's pause. It hadn't mattered to her, as the point where the stairs lead to hadn't changed, only where they'd come from. He'd been too transfixed by the transient architecture to notice anything else.

The moment that Headmistress McGonagall had reached the base of the stairs, Carrow backed off. He lifted his hand from Darcy to clap it against his opposite, entrapping his wand between his palms while he did so. His false smile gleamed. "Have a wonderful bureaucratic negotiation."

Darcy had very little opportunity to watch Carrow's back, as well. No sooner had the professor finished talking had the headmistress filled in the gap. She didn't bother with any waves, instead stepping onwards in the intended direction. "Dursley, follow me."

A part of Darcy's brain was tempted to add 'to the depths of hell'. His imagination kept saying this would end the way it had begun—with countless unspeakable mistakes and questions with no good responses. Instead, he settled on something far more vague and reasonable. "Where and why?"

"To my office. I presume you'd prefer not discussing your future in a crowded corridor." A safe enough assumption that Darcy bobbed his head to agree.

Only from this angle could Darcy finally see the spines of the headmistress' books. The closer he looked to the scrawl, the less they seemed like books at all. There were no names listed on them. Ribbons attached to the binding marked various pages in the plain leather-bound tomes. His instincts supposed they were journals.

In that brief moment of silence, Darcy couldn't help indulging the thought that they had something to do with him, too.

"I understand that your younger brother has already told you about Hogwarts," the headmistress asked, forcing Darcy back to attention.

He uttered a quick "affirmative," at the wall, struggling to sound less distant than he kept thinking he must have been.

Whatever the headmistress kept thinking about him, it couldn't have been that far from the truth. He hadn't even had to ask her for her words to answer him. "I assure you, though the circumstances of your acceptance may be unorthodox, we aren't questioning your eligibility. No matter what you might hear later, you have as much of a right to study here as any other student. What we need to determine are your house and your curriculum."

"So, I'm staying?"

"Provided you give the staff no reasons to change their minds, yes. You should thank your uncle for that. Few people alive today possess the strength of will to tell him no. Be aware that I'm very much one of them."

As challenging as it was to take most adults seriously, in this case, Darcy was willing to assume that wasn't a lie. He'd reluctantly put on some respect to answer stiffly. "Yes, ma'am." Even he had the sense not to cross someone who, at this moment, controlled the next three to seven years of his life.


End file.
